Is Google Making Hardcore Profits?

Did anyone catch the documentary on BBC2 last night called “Hardcore Profits”?

It was a look at how the porn industry has changed over the years and was trying to determine which companies are profiteering from the porn industry. In the industry these days they say that the women get a really rough deal and its getting a lot more hardcore in what is expected of them. The program went down some weak avenues trying to point the finger at Hotel chains who have pay per view porn channels available in the rooms and organisations who may have stocks and shares in companies like Sky and Virgin Media who have porn channels.

But they did raise an interesting point about Google profiteering from the porn industry and highlighted that there are sponsored listings allowed for terms such as “hardcore sex” and “anal sex” which each time they are clicked will be generating Google revenue. The programme compared it with search terms that Google are more strict on such as “guns” and “drug related terms”, and the porn industry due to the way it has changed should perhaps be treated in the same was and Google shouldn’t be helping to promote. Except Google continue to allow for PPC to run.

They did have a forensic accountant (sounds an interesting job) do some digging into Google accounts and apparently there was no division in the company figures that stated how much PPC revenue came from porn related terms. That seems quite hard to believe that their accounts are so generalised that they are not broken down by industry sector on the advertising front.

Anyway I kind of thought while I watched it that Google came off quite badly from the program, and was seen as one of the worse corporate offenders in generating profits from porn after the movie makers themselves.