Now that google announced the interest-based advertising which means that they will show ads based on the interests of visitors, are you OK with this or will you set your preference to "Do not show ads based on user interest categories"? I went with the second choice because google does not give me control over which categories I wish to show ads for or which categories I wish not to! For example, I don't want entertainment ads to appear on my websites to visitors who are interested in such category! What about you?
Not everything Google does works. They have killed plenty of programs in the past. There are already problems with local search and ip targeting. Lets say I want to search for Car Rentals for a vacation in Miami. And I go to a website about Miami Travel. And I live in Kentucky. Do I want to see Kentucky car rental ads because my IP is in Kentucky? I see similar problems with "Interest" based advertising. Just because I clicked on something in the past doesn't mean I want to see those types of ads in the future. I bought a piece of electronics equipment from Amazon a couple years back. Now nearly weekly I get the "People who bought also bought" type of related ads. It's highly annoying. I'd kill the email except I use it for a lot of other things. Now when I make an online purchase I use hotmai or yahoo or I set up a seperate email account just for the purpose so I don't get spammed to death. Only time will tell. For now I don't like the idea.
As with things Google Adsense, you test everyway possible. There's no cause for heated debate. You test the feature for one week - on and off. Whatever works best, you use. But if you wanna speculate, I will guess it will have no impact on my adsense revenue. So I'll leave it on, and update my privacy policy. Google obviously takes these things seriously and are constantly tweaking themselves. They dumped Youtube units today, couple of months back it was referrals. If this don't work, they'll probably dump it too.
Good post. I agree that they can mess up at times. I mean have you seen their rival product to Wiki with Knol? I don't think Chrome has done the business either.
Well I would just give it a try and let it run for a week or two. If it affects earning, definitely I'll have it turned off.
It certainly does. This is different from the public form where you can opt out seeing ads based on your interest categories if this is what you mean.
I personally have disabled Interest-based advertising. I think that, enabling this option will not help my sites or may be, this will decrease my earnings.
In the past, it was a known fact that traffic from social bookmarking sites does not convert. I'm now wondering if interest advertising may now cause the social bookmarking traffic to convert? After all, if ads are shown that are of interest to the person browsing on the site they may click, rather than ads specific to the site (which they may not be interested in)?