Google walks away from porn profits - 18 Aug 2014

"With great power comes great responsibility"

- Ben Parker (Spiderman's uncle)

You might have heard rumours of Google's recent decision to stop pornographic websites from advertising on their search pages - but you might not have realised how big a deal it really is. 

Basically, companies pay Google to have a little ad come up whenever someone does a search - (if you haven’t ever seen them, just try doing a simple search and look for the top couple of links that say ‘Ad’). As of 2012, the ‘AdWords’ function made Google something in the region of $100 million every single day! In fact, even taking in to account every service Google offers (phones, Maps, those weird glasses), ad revenue accounts for 90% of the company's total profits. 

Last month Google made the decision to stop allowing any porn sites to advertise via the ‘AdWords’ feature. This is a big decision by Google because, ultimately, it is one of the world’s leading businesses, making a very poor business decision, prioritising its moral stance over its profit margins. Financially, removing these ads does nothing but cut into the companies income and serves no other monetary gain. When you consider that something like 12% of all websites contain porn and 25% of all web searches are porn related - in May of this year over 350m Google searches for the words sex, porn, free porn and porno were made -  its an extraordinarily bold and impressive decision by Google. And one that will hopefully pave the way for other companies to do the same in the future...

To be clear, the decision doesn’t mean that people won’t be able to find pornography using the Google search engine, but it does mean that Google won’t be profiting from it any more. 

Pornography is an addiction that affects both those in the church almost as much as those outside of it. As Google paves the way, let’s pray that other companies would take up the challenge and do the same. 

All images are used by permission in accordance with commons copyright license terms: Feature image is a derivative of the images 'Google Logo Search', by Global Panorama