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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.
I have no problem with that. They just need to improve a little. A good example would be an e-mail to a friend where for 2-3 e-mails we were talking about a milk allergy we both have. Now to me the most logical advert for that is "Lactose free" things. But instead I got loas of adds going "try our super fantastical milk drink you can't drink yay!".
I don't mind targeted ads because if google really want to read my e-mail I can't stop them.I'd rather a script which doesn't remember them check through them quickly then some guy who was just hired off the street.
I like muppets.
Which then take longer to load. Take more time and become animated, then flash, then pop up..
It doesn't work. The only reasonpeople accept google ads is because they are like 1-2k each and they don't have flashy pictures or crap.
I like muppets.
(From your first link): In addition to text-based ads, Google's site targeting will include another ad format option, animated image ads. This is an enhancement to the image ads option they launched last year.
I thought people liked Google's ads because they were simple, unobtrusive, and fit in with your website. Now we're getting animated image ads (although I can't imagine "If this is flashing you're a winner!" ads being done by Google, although it could happen now) and by the looks of things (see the main article) the look is chosen for you, even if it doesn't fit in with the rest of the site. I don't know what Google are aiming to do here, but it doesn't look too kind to the end-user.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
I think Google ads are great. They're not too intrusive and they serve out relevant content, unlike many of the banner ad services out there.
As a tech savvy parent, I know only too well how some ad services work. For example, in the course of looking over the logs on my home network's main server, I found that somehow my son had been receiving some very questionable banner ads through some of the sites he frequents. When I confronted him about it, he said he had been downloading "r0mz," which are basically dumps of old video game ROMs that can be played using software emulators. Of course, I talked to him about the ethical issues inherent in using other people's work without paying whatever price they ask for (if any), but that seemed much less serious to me than the content of those ads!
I tell you, the smut they put on those sites -- I couldn't believe it! I would think these webmasters would have the sense not to put that sort of material on sites that presumably only children would be interested in. I can only assume their banner ad provider just doesn't have the kind of targetting technology Google uses.
-- Molly Lipton, Born Again Technologist.
I use /etc/hosts to filter ad sites, but I wonder if it's the "best way" of doing it. I have some docens of lines on that file like this:
0.0.0.1 doubleclick.net ad.doubleclick.net ads.mcafee.com 247.vo.llnw.net
0.0.0.1 doubleclick.com m.doubleclick.net m2.doubleclick.net ad.au.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.1 ads.web.aol.com ads.web.de ads.web21.com adserv.newcentury.net
0.0.0.1 adservant.guj.de adservant.mediapoint.de adserver-espnet.sportszone.com
0.0.0.1 advert.heise.de banners.internetextra.com bannerswap.com customad.cnn.com
0.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
which will make browsers fail when they try to show you ads. The list is longer (get it if you're curious)
But this seems a bit "hacky". Is there a better way to do this, is there some project which keeps track of such ad sites, or even ip ranges and allows you to block them easily?
If you have a site that uses adwords you have the choice of having text ads, image ads, or a mix. I gather that Google is still planning to give sites the choice about what they display.
I just hope they serve the images from a different domain than the javascript used to generate the text ads. Otherwise it won't be easy for most people to block the images without blocking the text.
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Colored syntax highlighting libraries for Java
For now, at least, I don't think the search engine is going to be switching. This is talking about Google's Adsense program, which is the text ads it puts on affiliate sites. As an affiliate, one can choose to display text or graphical ads. Some affiliates will switch to the graphical ads, others will remain with the text ads.
Personally I've clicked on a lot more text ads than banner ads, and I think text ads work better. If this is true, then there probably won't be much incentive for any affiliate sites to switch - if they work best with text ads (google certainly does), then they can use text ads, if their content works better with banner ads, then they can use them.
But if banner ads really do get better results, in addition to being annoying as hell, then you might see the price being offered for them reach levels which are hard to ignore. If so, maybe you'll even see google make the switch for its search engine. I doubt any of this will happen, but maybe it will.
Google will not allow the increasingly popular formats that include video, sound and interactive elements. And it has restrictions on the animation, to keep ads from repeating endlessly or flashing in a particularly distracting manner.
Hmm. Dunno yet. I'm not unilaterally against all advertising, just irritating advertising. I may not block these ads. We'll see soon, I suppose.
Software Wars
Although many of the people who use AdSense know enough about people to know not to turn the image ads on, there are a few people who will think it is "better", or think they will get more clicks if they use the images, or whatever; I don't want *any* annoying ads there and I am just annoyed that Google is allowing those people to do this.
And the google ads are in an iframe, so if that is blocked the images won't be shown with it, thankfully.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Great! Then you won't count as an impression for my Adsense campaigns. And you definitely won't accidentally become a clickthrough. Which saves me money. So my ads can get through to actual customers who want my products.
I don't personally have any ads...but we help our clients run an Adwords campaign. You can measure the success of these ads in conversions - interested parties that become a sale (or, in their case, a sales lead). If you don't intend to click on an ad, that's fine. Personally, I never click the paid listings on Google.
But a good number of people do. Where I consider natural listings to be more relevant, many users place a higher relevance on the paid listings. The numbers are there to back it up - so it's well worth my clients' time and money to use it. It's paid off quite well for them.