See, that's the thing too. They make it blatant that it is an ad by sticking that text on the ads, which decreases the "accidental" clicks, yet they still seem to by unconvinced that is enough. (Maybe they should make it flashing)
It's obvious that G is currently swallowing their own words. If they want the ads shown very visible to visitors that they're ADS, they shouldn't launch adsense which they said and suggested to blend to our page, and moreover, like in some previous posts, they suggested us to put the ad links near navigation menu. I'm sure they're not stupid guys, they realized this problem is going to rise later when they're launching adsense, but they let it go, they realized it's one of the factors that can make adsense big like now. And now, it's the time to clean it without getting pain (for them), everybody will still use adsense even though we're all complaining, at least until a new kind of 'revolutionary' ads type come, but when? so let's use adsense anyway lol.
I will probably ditch it because of this and other BS for my forums. Its only a couple grand a month and its not worth the headache to redo skins every time someone at google farts and gets offended about ad placement that conformed to their previous TOS. Some people still have static sites. For bloggers, proxies, and off the shelf forums its no issue. But I have a couple forums with 1000+ static pages. We cannot run iframes, so to change it I have to edit each one by hand. I bulk replace will get most but stupid stuff like channels and dates ruin that option for some. You're right though. 99% of people don't have the stones or don't care enough to leave google. For me I am lucky that its easy. I will still use adsense where I can deploy it easy but for me this is just a huge push else where.
They change policies as and when like. They update their policy & expected everyone to read. My site was disable because of a change of policy. Last time can do this ... now cannot ... so it is a violation.
Agree 100% with that. I think when a good alternative to adsense comes around (may that be Ask.com?) a lot of people will be leaving adsense. There's no good competition out there right now for CPC, which is a shame. IMO - Google should let it be said: Pages that were created before the "rule changes" are OK and can be left alone. When someone like me, owns 100+ sites (some with well over 100 pages) some were made before I knew of php includes - that is time consuming as hell and honestly not worth it for the 0.25 clicks the site(s) brings in.
Since they base policy on which way the prevailing winds are blowing, I wonder if our revenue split is going to ever go 75/25 like all the new cpc's. 50% increase in revenue over night would help justify their "dynamic" attitude. I will not hold my breath on that though.
I wonder if proxy owners are going to listen to this. I can't even begin to guess at the amount of accidental clicks they get with their proxy options so close to AdSense. PS: A lot of you shouldn't be complaining, accidental clicks destroy the advertiser/publisher relationship. Learn to deal with it because hurting the advertisers is only going to hurt you in return.
Not sure about you ads but a lot of mine are for Fortune 500s. Even if they never receive a single click ever they are still getting name recognition...... for free. I'm on my soapbox about the nav menu links policy. I have always kept ads away from any place where they might be click on accident, I never tell people to click, I never put them in pop ups or iframes and so on. I even placed them further from my menu than google themselves suggested because I did not want them to interfere with my site. SITE > ADS
It's mostly gray area... Any list of links could be considered navigation or menu items. I guess it's general on purpose... this way if they want to just close an account if they want to or deem it to be 'invalid click' heavy.