Most publications you read online have very little control of the ads they run on their website. A friend, after viewing what she felt was a very inappropriate ad on a parenting blog, asked me to explain why, since that's my field. This is what I told her.
Suppose you have a nice big house in a great neighborhood and you decide to rent out a room. At first you do all the arranging, the background checks of potential renters, placing the ads etc. It's great, but it's a lot of work and the room sits empty quite often so it doesn't make money all the time.
Someone approaches you and says you can have people bid on your room on a giant network with tons and tons of potential renters. That way you get a better rate for your room and it's always filled - plus they take care of finding and screening renters. You just tell them what parameters you want.
Sounds great!
So you set some basic parameters - you want non-smoking renters, basic background checking and some verification that they're able to pay.
Your first renter pays promptly, but uses illegal drugs. Well, technically you didn't specify no illegal drugs, so next time you add that to the parameters. Non-smoking, no illegal drug users.
The next tenant is a member of the Church of Satan and he freaks out your in-laws who visit one night for dinner. Okay, so non-smoking, no illegal drugs, Christian.
Your next tenant is a neo-Nazi and now your neighbors are getting a little bit concerned. So you specify liberal, Christian, non-smoking, no illegal drugs. That should cover everything.
Your latest tenant seems great, if a little reclusive. Then you notice your electricity bill quadrupled in a single month. This is due to your new tenant installing a farm of Playstation 3's to mine bitcoins.
Okay, well... So let's see, how about Liberal, Christian, non-smoking, no illegal drugs and no cryptocurrency mining. That should cover everything.
Finally you get a tenant that meets all the criteria, though with so many restrictions, the rate has dropped quite a bit to keep the room filled and you're not making much money.
Then you find out your current tenant is asking all of your friends and neighbors to sign up for an online gambling scam. She skips out with their money and personal data, and now none of your neighbors are talking to you, and people are starting to think about litigation.
So you give up on the bid-for-room model and go back to just doing it yourself.
This, in a very general way, is how online advertising works on many websites. Publishers of websites like the New York Times don't just rent out space to specific advertisers, they allow advertisers to bid on that space on ad exchanges. They can set some parameters, but they're not approving the advertisers directly.
This is how you can end up with ads you don't want on your publication - or conversely, advertising for your product on a website you don't approve of, like this case: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/16/guardian-pulls-ads-google-placed-extremist-material
While you should definitely let a website know what you think of an ad that appears inappropriate to their content, just understand that these things occasionally slip through and may not reflect the values of the publisher.
(After a long, somewhat ridiculous conversation with another friend in the business, we both decided we should keep the Cryptominer and just more to cover utilities. It pays to have friends with practical minds.)
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