Google Upgrades AdSense

An anonymous reader writes "According to a story in the New York Times, Google will now "give advertisers more control over where their ads are shown, how they pay for them and what they look like." Author John Battelle claims "The core philosophy of Google's advertising business is that these ads are actually valuable and useful to users: look for Chevy trucks and get Chevy truck ads. Now we are in another place. It's more about branding and more about advertising other things than what you are looking for, and, cynically, it may be about being a public company that needs revenue growth."" The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.

Comments

Non-registration links

[DeadSea]

Some registration free links:

• Search Engine Low Down - Google Tests Cost-Per-Impression Pricing and Targeting for AdWords
• San Jose Mercury News - Google changing the way ads are created, priced
• Silicon.com, UK - Google steps into banner ad world
• Houston Chronicle - Google testing systems that place ads on specific Web sites

Unfortunately, I don't see anything about this on Google's press release page yet.

--
Conversions of Currency Rates of Exchange

Re:Non-registration links

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, thanks! But BTW, the second link (Mercury News) is really a registration site.

Re:Evil?

[shreevatsa]

From the summary:
The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
So you can continue using the Google search engine, no unobtrusive ads there. (More pointed text ads, yes, but that's just obtrusive/unobtrusive as before, right?).

Oh no it isn't

[CdBee]

Adblock googlesyndication.com - no banners for me under any circumstances !

Re:Sad

[ScentCone]

I don't know about you, but I've had the option, so far, of accepting graphical AdSense ads or just sticking with text. It's in your account profile.

Re:Sad

[Wieland]

According to TFA, they're allowing graphic ads om their partners sites only, not on google.com. I too will be blocking it, though.

Misleading Summary

[michaelhood]

This is quite possibly the worst summary I've ever seen.
Fallacies:

1. This affects AdWords advertisers whose ads are *published* on the AdSense network. Not AdSense publishers. At all.

2. Image creatives have been an option in our AdWords accounts for at least 6 months. You see them on some AdSense publishers already, you just don't know it.

The real news here is the following:
1. Google is *bringing back* (they had it years ago) cost-per-impression advertising. However, this comes with improvements. I won't spam, see references. (R1)

2. Google is going to finally allow AdWords advertisers to decide what content network sites their ads are published on. (R1) Now we can decide NOT to place our ads on shady sites and fall victim to click fraud.

On the real news item #1, this is of huge interest because Google is allowing some "creepage" back to the CPM (cost-per-mil impressions) model. This seems to indicate that they're finally recognizing that click fraud is a *huge* problem. To the tune of it being estimated 15-20% clicks in competitive CPC (cost-per-click) markets on Google might be fraudulent. (R2)

References: (R1) (R2)

Re:Misleading Summary

[michaelhood]

You obviously didn't read my post sense you used the term "Adwords" three times where "AdSense" was the proper term. These are two totally seperate entities, but since even the submitters and/or editors can't keep them straight, I'll cut you some slack.

It's not been made clear what restrictions there will be on what *AdSense*-publishing sites you can specify your ads to run on. It won't be much different, however. If I decide I want my Airline to show up on a page about hotels serving AdSense, I just review the page and add some detailed hotel keywords to my Airline campaign. It works. This won't be much, if any, different.

As far as your "benefit small, struggling sites", I have no idea what you're talking about. The biggest spenders on AdWords are Fortune 500 companies, by and large.

The comment about graphic and intrusive advertising, these are standard-sized banners, *and they are only served if the site owner specifically says PUT AN IMAGE HERE.*

I avoided quoting your comment because most of it didn't make sense, and as for the rest of your comment, I can't figure out what you mean well enough to respond. Please clarify so I can help you to understand.

Re:how to get rid of ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the following script to automatically update my DNS server each night - keeps the ads away for me :-)

#!/bin/bash
cd /etc/blockedHosts

# rotate lists
for (( mm = 2; mm >= 0; mm-- )); do
(( nn = mm + 1 ))
/bin/mv adBlock.txt.$mm adBlock.txt.$nn
done
/bin/mv adBlock.txt adBlock.txt.0

# fetch new bogon list
if /usr/bin/wget "http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?host format=bindconfig&showintro=0&startdate%5Bday%5D=& startdate%5Bmonth%5D=&startdate%5By
ear%5D=&mimet ype=plaintext" -O adBlock.txt ; then
/bin/echo "got it"
rm adBlock.zone
exec 6<adBlock.txt

while read -u 6 x;
do echo " ${x}" >> adBlock.zone;
done;
rndc reload
else
/bin/mv/adBlock.txt.0 adBlock.txt
fi

AdWords, not AdSense

[freitasm]

The OP is using AdSense when in fact should be AdWords. Advertsisers use AdWords, publishers use AdSense.

Re:You are the reason the internet is going downhi

[hoomanb]

Ads are neccessary but they don't have to be graphical. AS USERS, WEBMASTERS AND ADVERTISERS, Google's text ads service really worked for me and just about everyone I know.

Re:Not surprising.

[ajs]

US Copyright law requires Google to defend their copyright or lose it. There is nothing evil about doing what you are required to do in order to defend your brand name.

For those unaware, here's the timeline:

2000 the domain, Froogles.com was purchased 2002 Froogles.com goes live, followed by Google bringing up Froogle.com, seemingly in response, and filing for trademark protection for Froogle.com 2003 Froogles.com files for trademark protection and attempts to block Google's trademark on Froogle.com 2004 Froogle.com trademark is granted to Google.

As you can see, this was an escalation between the two companies, but the fact of the matter is that running a search engine called /^[a-z]oogles?.com$/ is pretty much guaranteed to make an adversary of Google. Oh the shock! ;-)

Evil, in my book, would be applying for and enforcing trivial software patents; forcing lesser companies to accept monopolistic strings attached to routine business dealings; or forcing users to accept ads that render useful content difficult or impossible to use (especially for the disabled). Asking companies to be creative and come up with their own names is about as far from evil as you can get.

Re:Offensive Contextual Ads

[nmg196]

Please realise that this ad was not placed by eBay. It was placed by a random punter hoping to get some referral fees via eBays affiliate scheme. Hence the "aff" in the advert. Don't blame eBay for this unfortunate advert...

Re:Placement

[pete_m78]

How long have they been doing this?

Since at least 2002 - at first advertisers needed to spend at least US$5000 a month to get up there. Nowadays normal Adwords can get to that position - provided the ads are fairly popular (i.e. they get clicked on a lot.)

Re:Other examples of inappropriate gmail advertizi

[manthrax3]

I read someplace in the privacy policy that they try to filter ads for personal situations like a death or a breakup.

If you have an e-mail thread yielding lots of advertisements, reply with:
"my grandmother died"

And they're all gone.

Maybe I'll make it my sig.