Google Updates AdSense Rules, Still Working on Radio

Photocritic writes "The practice of placing images above or next to adsense banners has been around for a while — the idea is to trick visitors into thinking that the Googe Ads are clickable image captions. Unsuspecting visitors click on the ads, and the webmasters make money. Now, Google has officially announced that the practice is no longer allowed. Meanwhile, the Marketwatch site is reporting that the company's previously discussed move into radio advertising is getting a mediocre reaction. Google, as yet, does not have enough access to airtime for the project to be profitable. The company plans on purchasing more airtime to expand the program, and is reportedly also looking to begin selling television ads as well." From the article: "Until Google can strike a deal with CBS, or some other radio giant, 'there will be no significant impact until mid-2007' on Google's bottom line, or the radio industry in general, [analyst Jordan] Rohan said in his research note. 'We believe a critical mass of advertisers is interested in testing the platform,' Rohan said, based on his interviews with his own sources. 'However, there is simply not enough radio inventory in the Google Audio system (yet) to enable buyers to run campaigns.'"

Adsense makes me a ton of money

I think these rules are good, there's no point in tricking people into clicking. They have to see a value then the ads serve their purpose. Go Go Google!

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the link units don't lead directly to ads - they lead to a list of related ads (and obviosuly so at that) which don't become a 'click' for the publisher unless the user actually to clicks through to one of them.

Good idea, but...

Just how do they plan on enforcing this? Take away the adsense from a webmaster if they find a site that is violating this new procedure? I mean, sure, its a bit of an unscrupulous business practice, but in the end, doesn't make more money for Google too?

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Not necessarily, because people who click on an ad accidentally don't tend to buy from the site they visit, so it lowers the value of google's adverts. So they get money in the short term, but less advertisers in the long run.

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what you say is absolutely true. Quality of the click is what counts. As an AdSense publisher, I tuned my site and made it attractive for some advertisers. over the long run I don't have as many clicks for them, but they are getting quality visitors ( mayb

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I don't think that Google would make more money. They make more when advertisers believe that the click through's are from prospective/interested buyers. If there is a perception that the clicks are generally not legit or that enough of them are illegiti

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I know that I don't fully trust AdSense. I used to use AdSense, but stopped when I kept paying lots of money for ads continuously clicked from a select number of website (don't remember the URLs off the top of my head, and I don't feel like scouring my log

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Did you consider reporting the problem? It's my understanding (from both Adwords and Adsense customers, not just Google itself) that Google will attempt to "undo the damage" of that sort of click fraud.

I both place ads (for my photographic services) and

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I did report the problem, and they said they would investigate. Nothing came of it, and I determined it was much easier to just cancel my campaigns, especially considering that even the clicks that did seem legitimate still did not return a profit, with ab

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*nods* I found AdSense works a lot better for me for some products than others. The real winner for me is the art fair panels I rent out, I get $125 for renting them out for a weekend, probably end up paying 25-50 cents for a click-through and I'd guess

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>with about 1 pay sign-up per 40 clicks, which, at $9.99 per pay signup
> and $1.00 (average) per click, it wasn't worth it in the long run.

Two things here.
1. If 40 people visit your site and only 1 person signs up, then your ads were probably too gen

Re:Good idea, but...

I know that I don't fully trust AdSense. ... It was obvious someone was clicking just to get their sites money from AdWords ... I payed what was owed and cancelled all my campaigns, and haven't been back since.

AdWords is for advertisers, AdSense is for webmasters. As an advertiser, you have the option of only paying for Google search traffic (plus optionally partner search like AOL). If you don't like AdSense traffic at all, disable it for your campaigns. AdWords now allows you to block poor converting AdSense domains through the web interface.

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That wouldn't work financially, however, because the cost to just ENABLE search ads (much less have them appear high on the list) is generally ridiculous (except for very obscure search terms), usually on the order of $5-$25 per click, which wouldn't even

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It depends on the services you're advertising. I do ColdFusion consulting, and mostly to test out AdWords I set up some ads and I have it manage my campaign and spend a maximum of $10/month. I'm working on a client right now who found me "through Google"

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My company disabled afilliate ads (the display of our ads on third party websites) because of what appeared to be fraudulant clicks. Google seemed not to care.

When we turned it off, guess what? It turned itself back on. Of course, we had no explicit rec

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When we turned it off, guess what? It turned itself back on. Of course, we had no explicit record to demonstrate this to google, and they had no records of their own. It cost us several thousand dollars in fees to google.

Google tracks all changes made to y

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Was it click-fraud or was it a poorly optimised site?

I'm not saying you're wrong, it might well have been a click fraud problem, but lots of people clicking through then leaving is not an uncommon problem for any advertising, not just on Googles network.

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The workings of Adsense are still very mysterious. I subscribed early this year after several years of deliberation (I hate advertisement). The first two months I raked 800$/mo. Since then it's been around 300$/mo. The traffic always stayed the same (the s

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as a publisher using AdSense, I would, if I was you, pay attention to which ad's are being viewed on your site. then start filtering out the ones that are not viable for your users.

it takes about 3 months to get it right, but when you do, you get quality a

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Yeah, I had the same issue, in about two years time, late 2004 until mid this year, I saw my adwords/adsense ads cost for my hobby site go from $20/month to a peak of over a hundred, given this was my limit. Most of those were "content network" ads... whe

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It was a click, then leave, over and over and over again, hundreds of times.

Maybe it was time to think whether it is really fraud, or whether anyone is really compelled to stay on your site for more than 2 secs after entering.

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Just how do they plan on enforcing this? Take away the adsense from a webmaster if they find a site that is violating this new procedure?

Um, yes. Exactly.

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Not a webmaster here. It was actually a legit question :-)

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*nods* It is a good question.

With other policies Google has, I'm told, been pretty direct about closing down publishers when their sites seem to be the source of fraudulent clicks. I'm OK with that, although it's a bit intimidating, I make a decent amo

Running on empty?

FTFAS:

'However, there is simply not enough radio inventory in the Google Audio System (yet) to enable buyers to run campaigns.'

Got it started, but then ran out of G.A.S.? <grin>

Is it worth it?

Maybe I'm off base, but I wouldn't have expected the supreme 21st-century new-millennium Web-2.0 information-superhighway buzzword-erific folks at Google to bother with ancient and increasingly less relevant mainstream network radio. Wouldn't they be jump

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Wouldn't they be jumping all over Internet or satellite radio, instead?

I believe that such services are subscription based (i.e. no ads) so there isn't any room for Google to come in.

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Satellite radio is subscription based, but increasingly also carries advertisements. Kind of like cable TV.

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Satellite radio is subscription based, but increasingly also carries advertisements. Kind of like cable TV.

Not really. Satellite radio gets its programming from two sources - in house, and 3rd party. In house stuff is supposed to remain commercial free. It

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If google could advertise on satellite radio that would be ideal, because the stations are geared towards a specific genre, whether it be sports or rap music, and you could gear ads towards a certain demographic.

And regular radio isn't?

...advertise on satellite radio that would be ideal, because the stations are geared towards a specific genre, whether it be sports or rap music, and you could gear ads towards a certain demographic.

And regular radio stations aren't "geared" toward a parti

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That would be a better idea if it weren't for the fact that satelite radio is commercial free. Although I've heard there are some commercials on XM, Sirius has a firm "No Ads" policy. I just hope it stays that way and doens't do what cable tv did. I sti

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Perhaps, but given the wide number of radio station formats with solid demographic ranges, and also given that people do still listen to the radio quite a bit despite the advance of technology (else why would there be satellite radio?), Google's making a s

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Everybody across the entire country hears the exact same thing.

Have you listened to any major broadcast network radio at all lately? You could actually drive coast to coast and hear the same ten songs over and over.

Coming Soon

Until Google can strike a deal with CBS, or some other radio giant...

Google announces deal with Clear Channel in 5, 4, 3, 2...

Similar policies exist, or do they?

In most magazines and newspapers, if an advertizer mimics the content of the mag or newspaper too closely, the publisher adds a prominant "ADVERTISEMENT" headers and footers to separate the ad from the content. So it might appear that google policy is just an on line implementation.

On the other hand, unless I have misunderstood the policy completely, here Google prohibits content from mimicking the ad too closely. Do we have any thing like that in the print world? Time Mag specifically making its article look like an ad?

Does it mean that someday TiVo would ban TV shows from inserting fake ads to fool its ad-skipper? Nah, TiVo has already sold out to the corps. MythTV does not have the clout.

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Well, you can't exactly click ads in a magazine either. I think this policy is important because google is basically saying "we don't want our advertisers to attempt trick consumers". Whether or not these ads actually tricked anyone is moot, the point is t

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It's different from the magazine scenario.

In this case, it's the PUBLISHER trying to trick the consumer. The advertiser is the one who is really tricked though, because they ultimately pay for the click.

I wonder what will happen to share price...

I wonder what will happen to share price when people realize that Google is more-or-less a traditional media company?

Also, I wonder why Google doesn't just hand this "challenge" to its gaggle of geeks and say, "no deadline, no pressure, and you can call it beta if you're afraid to stand behind it."

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I wonder what will happen to all the free google goodies I use when people realize that Google is more-or-less a traditional media company? I also wonder what happens when traditional media catches up using higher quality media. Limiting the use of texts

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Logically it would rise. Google is currently 353rd on the Fortune 500 list. Time Warner is 40th, and most of the other big media groups are in the top 100.

And for those who are interested, Yahoo is 412th despite sooo many fingers in sooo many pies. Di

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I wonder what will happen to share price when people realize that Google is more-or-less a traditional media company?

Logically it would rise. Google is currently 353rd on the Fortune 500 list. Time Warner is 40th, and most of the other big media groups a

How broadly is "unacceptable" defined?

I happen to run a fairly popular online comic site and use AdSense ads to supplement some of our existing advertising. What I want to know is just how broad their definition of "unacceptable implementations" is. The common practice that I and many other on

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Yes, I would think that your implementation would also be unacceptable. When you look at the purpose of your images, it is to draw attention to the ad. There is already a policy about not drawing undo attention to ads.

If you images were actually there f

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I saw another site use this technique of placing thumbnails above text ads and gave it a shot. It doubled the number of clicks I was receiving.

Not sure what to make of this news. I was quite happy earning the extra money, but I'd rather not have my account

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Oh, and sorry to double-post, but I was contacted by Google's AdSense Optimization Program recently. Their advice for one of my sites was to actually make the ads look as much like the content as possible - confusing.

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Think about this as an user of the website in question. If you are trying to navigate a website, then what looks like an image caption should be an image caption. Anything else is just usability flaws, which is bad form, bad manners, and bloody annoying. I

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Maybe users who can't tell ads from site images don't deserve such consideration ;)

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That did strike me as well, but the problem is that the vast bulk of web users aren't fully web-savvy. One of the big downfalls of the web is the dozens of different user interfaces and user experiences available to web users, and unscrupulous webmasters t

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If they were unscrupulous, they wouldn't be using adsense, right? They'd go for flashing banners and "you've won something big" marquees. Cut them some slack will you? Deltas are always in majority. Lets use them.