What Happened With Adsense?

All Adsense users signed a new contract recently. For most of them, the change meant very little. For those who make money as bloggers, they either saw their income go up, or down. This may have been totally independent of the number of clicks to their pages.

The murmuring among the web-world blamed Google’s recent acquisition of DoublClick. This includes a new tool (Ad Manager) that should make it easier for advertisers to put their own ads on their pages, free. It also comes with several tools that should make the ad world work better.

Advertisers are complaining. The tool is designed to take a look at all an advertiser’s ads and then put the best one on the page. This tool tracks where visitors are travelling through the web, and then tries to match the ad that is most likely to result in a sale.

Advertisers are saying the new program is not working that way, despite the fact that their costs increased. Some advertisers claim their costs doubled.
There are alternatives. OpenX is a good choice.

The rules have effected how Adsense ads can be placed on a page. There has been a long term practice of placing images above, or beside, Adsense ads. Google will no longer allow this. There must be no images near. This upset some bloggers who positioned the ads so that the Google ads appeared to be alternative links associated with the image.

Publishers may now run Google ads on pages with other ads, such as Adbrite.com chitika.com or without being banned. The only rule is that the ‘other’ contextual ads must not look like the Google ads. Other alternatives are Clicksor, Kanoodle, Contextweb

Many bloggers have started using Kontera. I tried it for a few days, then took it off. It messed up my menus and made the site look like a MFA or splog.
However, is this a smart idea? We will have to see if sites that have multiple ads receive less from Google than those that are ‘pure’ Google. Only time will tell.