Hey guys. We occasionally get reports of an Google AdSense ad that's not up to our standards... if we can track down the ad, then we usually just block it. Along those lines, over the weekend we got a report about a "1 tip for a tiny belly" ad, which I just now had the chance to track down. Here is a screenshot:

I did some research, and found a Washington Post ad which said that these ads are part of some sort of a broader scheme:

The innocent-seeming “1 Tip” ad is actually the tip of something much larger: a vast array of diet and weight-loss companies hawking everything from pills made from African mangoes to potions made from exotic acai berries. Federal officials have alleged that the companies behind the ads make inflated claims about their products and use deceptive means to market them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ubiquitous-tiny-belly-online-ad-part-of-scheme-government-says/2011/06/27/gIQAbI6Q1H_story.html

From what I can tell, these ads link to a wide range of sites... so it's not possible to easily to just block this one ad. So we went ahead and blocked all weight loss ads from Hellobee. Many thanks to the person who reported the ad!

We've also blocked the following categories of ads on Hellobee, in response to specific ads that our readers have mentioned to us:

* Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification - We were getting too many ads for cosmetic surgery, and decided to just block all of these type of ads.
* Dating - there were a number of ethnic dating sites that advertised that generated complaints).
* Politics - Political ads generate complaints on both sides, especially during election years.
* Sex & Sexuality - These ads didn't always appear to have fully clothed people in them.
* Video Games (Casual & Online) - I forget why we blocked this category. I think there was one advertiser in the category behaving badly, and plus I think we hardly had any advertisers in the category anyway.
* Weight Loss - As discussed above.
* Gambling & Betting - This is default disabled in Google AdSense, and we never enabled it.

Just wanted to let you guys know that we police these ads, and that we appreciate it when you let us know if an ad looks like it doesn't belong. You can always post any reports to the help forum or to my wall...

Ok that's it for our Google AdSense update! Hope you're having a great day...