My Adsense Lady called me a told me to remove the images next to my 336 boxes, funny thing is SHE IS THE ONE WHO TOLD ME TO PUT THEM ON THE SITE!! I told her that there are hundreds of sites that have pictures next to the ads and she said i need to tell her the sites and she will take care of it! I told her that i would not. im not the PO POs is it alright to have a line break up the pic/ads GOOGLE THINKS THEY ARE GOD
they told me its ok as long as I seperate the ads from the pics with a line. At the moment I have a table around a ad unit and images placed next to it outside the table borders
They do have a point though, running their system with a max no. of users aimed at paying the least ammount as possible..... But besides from the payout the really do have a point. As a directory owner about half of the submissions I receive are not the 'good old lame'mfa-sites, but sneaky even lamer mfa-sites lurking the visitor into clicking on the ads, not dispalying them as ads. Off course we're all into this to make money, but the line between adding adds to earn a little or pay for bandwith, and actual sitebuilding around ads is fading real fast. Ie. the number of totally crappy sites using no original content (copied content/stolen content/only rss feeds) is rapidly growing, which is both a pain for directory-owners (junnnnnksubmissions), surfers (what content can 'I' trust) and webmasters (a lot of mfa sites promote heavily and keep ending up higher and higer on searchengines, even above good sites aiming at quality, not ad(-sense) content)
Sooner or later, Adsense will take this measurement more seriously. They conducted a research recently, by displaying a golden egg next to ads. I think they saw the CTR was doubled yet the G1 in Analytics didn't increase. We think putting image next ads increase the revenue, but you might be spoiling the image of adsense, so in long term advertisers might be skeptical over the quality of adwords. Then who will suffer?