Google has announced that it’s launched limited beta testing of a new feature: the ability to filter certain categories of advertising so that they don’t appear on a publisher’s site at all.
Google says that this is one of the top requests from publishers, explaining:
Category filtering will give publishers the ability to block ads that fall into specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics. Regardless of how ads are targeted, they’ll be filtered if they’re within one of the selected categories. We’ll also show the percentage of recent revenue that ads in each category generate, so publishers can predict how filtering selections will impact their revenue.
Currently, it’s only possible to block certain URLs from appearing in ads, which is not only time consuming and fairly hit-and-miss to set up, but also limited in number.
It could be some time before this rolls out to the wider publisher network, presuming that feedback from the initial group of testers is favourable.
Here’s a screenshot of the current interface (click for larger version).
(Via ProBlogger)