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

Re:It's okay

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

how to get rid of ads?

[diegocgteleline.es]

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?

Re:how to get rid of ads?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Thanks!, so this page is the pointer I needed *duck*. Nice, it has lots of formats, from /etc/hosts to C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, to BIND and MS XML files....

Re:Non-registration links

[DeadSea]

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.

--
Colored syntax highlighting libraries for Java

Re:Non-registration links

[tehshen]

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.