A notice to all our valued visitors:

PLU Blogs has been serving up useful articles for the GLBT community and acting as a link for the gay blogosphere for close to two years now. We hoped you have found our service useful, but a site like ours requires significant investment to keep operating, so you may have noticed we try and offset our costs by serving Google Advertisements on some of the pages.

Whilst the amounts we receive would never make us rich, they have been enough to cover our bandwidth and hosting costs, and the odd pack of crisps to munch on whilst we administer the site.

Over the last couple of months however, our current monthly revenue is less than a third of what it used to be - for no apparent reason. This has made it very hard to even cover hosting costs when our bandwidth comes up to hundreds of gigabytes and is steadily increasing every month.

Is Google discriminating against sites with gay content? Is there some homophobic middle manager pulling the strings? We're not sure. Some gay blogs who use Google Adsense have also found their revenue dwindling or even cut off. Some of these reputable sites include Scott-O-Rama, HomoMojo, UndiesDrawer, TreyCruz.com, GayTwoGether, and a lot more who are suffering silently.

We've read quite a few articles saying how good (and non-homophobic) the work environment at Google is, but we also wonder how accurate those claims are - considering what we're dealing with. We're not trying to make a profit here, we're simply trying to survive and give back something to the GLBT community. Someone, somewhere, obviously doesn't think that's fair.

After all, you don't have to look far to find Google ads on a straight blog with pictures of undressed women. Also, advertising by gay-themed businesses like RealJocks.com (Meet Fit Gay Men!) and GayDatingPortal is accepted by Google, yet publishers are being discriminated against. So it’s fine to take our money when we offer it?

This fight is not new, and we demand a satisfactory answer from Google. We would encourage you all to contact Google using the link below, and express your concern that they may be unfairly targeting gay blogs.

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py

If you have an interest in supporting our fight, please feel free to reproduce this article for posting on your blog.

Yours sincerely,
Louis (PLU Blogs Chief Editor)

Hi there,

I would like to know why my site (plublogs.com) is serving up Public Service Announcements (PSA's). It is not breaching any of your Terms of Service (TOS).

It serves as an information portal to the GLBT community, of which traffic-wise, it is fairly successful. However, the revenue from Adsense is poor, to say the least.

Also, over the previous month my income has halved from what it was a month earlier. This cannot be simply traffic related, as the income is less than half whilst the clicks and everything else is consistent.

I believe there is some manual modification to my account going on, perhaps by some homophobic employees.

I would hope it is not general practice within Google to discriminate.

I am also well aware of other blogs that have had their accounts 'tweaked' or cancelled, or the content deemed 'inappropriate' whilst heterosexual blogs continue to serve up much more inappropriate content, unhindered.

I look forward to your prompt reply.