Today i surfed my own websites running adsense. Three of them. It seems that something has changed. ALL the IMAGE ads displayed were totally irelevant from the pages content. And in English, while my sites are not in English. Text ads seems to be the same (not changed). So, Google Targeted ads system is already working or testing things. For me, i see it as very bad change. The competitive ads filter is become useless.
Interest-based ads some love them.... some say that new thingggy suc**** now day its common to see Linux/Unix site display flower and skying adds... cool... eeh New futures comes... then you will see the drop of CTR... CTR nearly comes to the end....
When i complained to adwords that my (English) ads keep showing up on non-English sites/pages they said it's my problem.
"With regard to your question as to why your ads may be showing on non-English pages .. You should continue to run Placement Performance reports to identify sites where you'd prefer your ads to not show, and exclude them using the Site/Category Exclusion tool."
I'd be interested in the response you would get, if you asked them (adsense) why English ads are showing up on your non-English pages. Might draw an interesting comparison.
I don't see how this is going to affect the competitive ad filter; if you specify sites you don't want to host advertisements for, the filter will still do its job.
thats why i've never used image ad from google. for me, google is all about link units and ad units period.
Since google shows ads NOT related to the website's niche but to the visitor tastes, HOW do you know what ads are shown ? Apparently you don't understand what that new concept means and how it works.
A good example is this forum ads. I usually saw very relevent ads. Now i get half of them, the rest are image ads that have nothing to do with this forum posts.
When I have tried image ads in the past I hardly ever saw relevant ads....when Google bought double click the image ads got worse because then none of them seemed targeted.
That's right. With the new targeted ads scheme coming to being, I have seen my sites showing many non-targeted ads. It is strange that the targeted ads are just doing the opposite...
This will be a MAJOR dissaster for tight niche websites. General sites will benefit, but that also remains to be seen.