Jack Campin wrote: if you write things that advertisers don't want to tie their product to ... at least some of them will do a content search and bugger off.

Advertisers may monitor the sites their adverts appear on, but they will complain to Google and Google will complain to the publisher (i.e. Max).

On a site like Mudcat, which includes user-generated content, Google will hold the site responsible for ensuring that ads are not placed next to content which is offensive. Google monitors that and the site will get a warning if their content policies are violated. Enough warnings and the site's account will be closed.

One way that Google recommends to prevent juxtaposition of ads and potentially objectionable content is to only put ads on pages with no user content. In the Mudcat context that would be the threadlist pages. That would decrease the revenue quite a lot, I should think.

Other ways are to censor content with word-blacklists, closely moderate posts, ban users...

So yes, it might work - but could have unintended consequences.