Saturday, November 17, 2007

Google Makes Adsense Less Clickable (but in a good way)

Google announced on both the Adwords blog and Adsense blog that they've changed the format of their content ads. So now instead of the entire ad body being clickable, it's only the link and URL portions--yeah, the parts that should have been clickable all along. I'm not sure how much of Google's revenue comes from accidental clicks, I'm guessing it's not huge, but I've clicked on an adsense link accidentally by clicking on the text of the ad. This seems like good news for advertisers: fewer junk clicks, but bad news for adsense publishers: less revenue from accidental (junk) clicks. On the adsense blog, they try to spin it as a positive saying that advertisers will be more satisfied and spend more, but they admit that they're doing it to get rid of bunk clicks--which will reduce publishers' revenue. Bummer for them (us), but sweet for advertisers (oh wait, that's us, too!).


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