I posted this on my blog and thought I'd share it since I find it both annoying and interesting. It is also a shameless plug for my blog which I'm trying to revive after months of neglect Hopefully no major screw ups in the article, currently lacking a proof-reader. Comments on the blog are of course appreciated. Relevant Ads and Adsense Blindness http://www.bloggerskills.com/relevant-ads-and-adsense-blindness/ The strength of contextual advertising, and especially Google Adsense, is the ability to with very high accuracy match website content with highly relevant advertising. Ads that are targeting for your visitors should be of more interesting to your visitors. Logic and common sense says that if you are into the content of a website, you are likely at least interested in advertising directly relevant to that particular content. Contextual advertising usually enjoy higher CTRs (Click-Through-Rates) than other common advertising formats, but over the past months I’ve noticed a change, especially on my Myspace web site and manga/anime forum. It seems like people are suffering from “Adsense-blindness†and in my case the higher CTR have changed over to random CPM (Cost-Per-Mille) advertising, people are clicking more on the random graphical ad banners than the Adsense text links or contextual ad banners. This is one of the main reasons why I’m moving away from Adsense more and more. I never kept detailed records but I did notice this tendency during 2007 and today the difference for some ad units is very significant. Below I’ve included screenshots with one day of stats for a 300×250 graphical banner from a network based on the Yieldmanager platform (like CPX Interactive for example) and a screenshot with roughly one day of stats with a 300×250 Adsense unit (both image and text ads) in the same spot on the same website. I decided to only take down one day of stats due to the terrible Adsense revenue, the difference is so obvious anyway. Yieldmanager: CTR = 0.63 Adsense: I am fully aware that the channel on the Adsense stats says “zoodu_bannerâ€, I did not create a new channel for this, I simply picked an old channel I didn’t use. Personally I am not fond of this change at all, since it has just helped to make Adsense approach revenue levels so abysmal that I am some days giving away advertising space for free. I am not making much more from the CPM advertising because of the increased number of clicks so in the end it is nothing more than a net loss. So why do so many of my visitors click on irrelevant ads these days while less and less click on relevant ads? There is probably more than just one cause, the huge difference in CTR suggests a combination of things. Two theories I find reasonable is that sex sells and that the banners being clicked on are of a slightly suggestive nature. More “fun†ad banners in combination with Internet users in my niches becoming increasingly blind to Adsense are to me likely contributors to this drastic change. Some niches have become so saturated with web sites and Adsense ads that the general audience has become Adsense-Aware.