Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Will Google eliminate the 336 x 280 ad format?

After requiring adsense publishers to post privacy policy in their sites, Google has again announced new rules that should be observed by bloggers who monetize their sites with adsense. This time, publishers are prohibited to place ads under a title or section which will give out an impression that the ads are not ads.

I am quite uncomfortable with this because my adsense monetized sites generally display adsense right below the post title. Worse, I always enumerate things in my sites so I generally use titles such as Wednesday jobs for writers; Beautiful Free Blog Templates for New Blogger, etc. See this screenshot from Jobzonline:


This new adsense rule update also prohibits the use of ads near links or texts that have the same colors and line spacing as the ads. To make things easier to understand, Google is eliminating ads that can "trick" non web savvy users to click ads that look like part of the site contents.


Uh-oh, this will really make me busy updating my sites the next few days.

The ad format that works well with my sites is the 336 x 280 size and since most adsense publishers use this format to make the ads look like part of the site content, (yes, "trick non websavvy users" as you may say), will Google eliminate the 336 x 280 or similar ad formats soon? If that happens, that will surely be a bad news for me and a number of adsense publishers out there.

 
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