By now we all know about the recent change in Adsense policy about images beside ads, it`s hit us hard and probably hit other publishers as well. It`s not surprising that Adsense has updated their policy this month, either. They just needed to add the new information about images beside the ads right?
Well…not exactly. They did add new wording to the TOS about the official images beside Adsense, but they`ve also made several other significant changes.
The Good:
There is some speculation that Google is going to being allowing other contextually related ad systems on Adsense pages, as they removed some wording regarding contextual ads. It now says any other ads cannot be formated like your google ads. However, the policy still states in another area that you may not have content targeted ads on any pages with Google Adsense. This however, is pure speculation and personally I don’t put much stock in it.
The Bad:
1. Regarding the above change, the wording was changed to prohibit non contextually related ads mimicking your Adsense, something that was perfectly acceptable before this new update.
2. You are also not allowed to display similarly formated contextual ads anywhere on your site. Previously it was just pages with Adsense on them. This is a fairly significant change, as a lot of publishers (lucky Americans anyway) would do A/B testing between Google Adsense and YPN to see which would pay the most. Now this is not allowed unless the YPN and Adsense is formated differently. This is obviously not the ideal for A/B testing as different formats will have different click through rates, etc.
This is by far the most significant change made in the new Adsense TOS
The Ugly:
Am I the only one that feels like Google is treating it’s Adsense publishers like the red-headed step child? I understand they need to protect their advertisers interests, and that is important but at some point publisher interests need to be looked after as well. From where I’m sitting, I really wish YPN would come out of beta and allow us Canadians to get a slice of the pie. It would really be nice to have an option other than the big G. I may be a bit biased due to the fact that across our account our clicks are paying less than half of what they were at the beginning of the month.
January 19th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Just wanted to add something to your post…
I personally think Google needs to take a more pro-active approach to protecting it’s adsense program, instead of treating us like an unwanted problem why don’t they just start reviewing sites which earn a certain ammount of money or have a higher CTR then average.
I’m pretty sure advertisers using the site network lose alot more money to MFA sites and arbitrage sites then they do because of sites using images and other sneaky methods of increasing their CTR’s, not that I disagree with the new image policy but Google really needs to work on rewarding webmasters who have great sites more and really put a concetrated effort into keeping out the garbage.
However if they actually did that it would mean hiring loads of staff to approve sites before they would be added to someones account, however in the long run I think it would really help to secure the money tree known as adsense.
January 20th, 2007 at 9:18 am
[…] This is huge news, I posted about the speculation of this change the other day (here). I honestly put 0 stock in those rumors and I’m quite shocked at this turn of events. While I’m sure there are many other reasons they have made this change, it does feel like Google it’s publishers a little more consideration and that is definitely a good thing. […]