There's a great company that used to be called AdSafe, now called Integral Ad Science, that offers a service to identify adult or other non-ad-friendly content.
I don't think it'd be feasible to run an advertising company that was less strict on adult/copyrighted content. People that buy advertising are really risk-averse on that subject, they don't want to see a meme on twitter or whatever of their brand next to porn.
1) The content that got my site kicked off adsense was text only, and it was a girl writing about going skinny dipping. It was tamer than much of cable TV, but I'm guessing some word frequency algorithm thought it was more than that. We aren't talking ads showing up next to porn. The great frustration is that if you aren't a big player, google doesn't give a shit and maybe they will turn your ads back on, maybe they won't. I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there that would jump on any ad network that didn't make you fear this all of the time.
2) My assumption, and I could be wrong about this, is that there are a lot of companies willing to advertise that aren't as paranoid. They may be able to pay less per click for the same quality of traffic, due to less competition for opening up to content that is less than PG
RE: 2), the difficulty there is that you're now chasing the long tail of small dollars in a high-initial-touch business. Maybe a self-serve model could work, but the big corps and ad agencies representing the big money in the market are really really big on the brand safety thing. I'm not saying they're right, but as long as they're the ones signing the big checks, they don't really have to be.
I guess a self-serve business would be possible, but since your costs are the same for non-sketchy (for whatever silly definition of sketchy) content, you basically become a remarketer for the content that everyone else doesn't want to advertise on. You can sell it, sure, but it's a hard pitch.
I'm sure you're right, which is why I'm moving away from ads. The examples that give me some sliver of hope are reddit and tumblr, both of which have some form of ads.
Well, you'd think that Google could pro-actively not show ads on occasional 'bad' content rather than putting it on each individual website operator to avoid displaying the adsense iframe (or whatever it is) on content that might bother Google. They're already identifying it.. why not just not show the ad? And then only penalize accounts that have a really big % of unadvertisable content.
http://integralads.com/
I don't think it'd be feasible to run an advertising company that was less strict on adult/copyrighted content. People that buy advertising are really risk-averse on that subject, they don't want to see a meme on twitter or whatever of their brand next to porn.