A list of political domain names for blocking?

October 30, 2012 8:14 PM

Do you know of a master list of active political domain names being used in the current American election? I need it so I can block all ads pointing to those sites.

I run a website that uses AdSense to display others' ads to visitors, and although we have turned off the political ads (meaning that our visitors should not see any political ads), and all other sensitive ads, some visitors are still seeing them. And when those ads don't match the visitors' politics, the visitors start steaming at the ears and blaming us.

So, I'm hoping that someone already has a magical list of all the domain names being used in the current American political campaigns. Maybe you built one yourself. Maybe your Google-fu is better than mine. Or maybe you know of some place I can scrape a list.

It's surely a game of Whac-a-Mole, but if I can't find a way to block whatever Google can't manage to do, then I'm going to have to remove the ads and lose the revenue for the next week.

posted by Mo Nickels to computers & internet (2 answers total)

Google Adsense should have a politics category you could disable (and you could try more categories as well as it appears you've already done "politics"), however it may still be a good idea to lose revenue for the week for your visitors' sake. Category blocking isn't always 100%, especially when there's a lot of interest in a particular topic where people are finding ways around the filters. There's unfortunately no easy way to "screen" adsense ads before they are delivered.
posted by samsara at 7:01 AM on October 31, 2012

I don't know that you can block political ads for the next week. I'm pretty sure they will be the only ads anybody sees in any media for the next week. I think your options are just turn off adsense for a week, or maybe post a note apologizing and explaining that you are doing your best, but blocking 100% of ads that you don't agree with just isn't technically feasible. I would think that would suffice for reasonable adults, but it sounds like your readers may not be reasonable adults.
posted by COD at 7:31 AM on October 31, 2012 [1 favorite]