Just wanted to share with you guys what I just found by accident. Never saw this before so I guess it might be Google beta testing ad formats with premium publishers. 5 ads, no "Ads by Google" message and tooltips when the mouse is over the ad. Saw it on the travel section of http:// about. com. The ads are served by Google. Do you think tooltips might help increasing CTR?
Intresting, they seem to be all over about.com and definately are from google. Hopefully we will see them officially soon
They may just keep that ad format for their premium publishers... I just have to get to premium publishers status...
I saw it too. It's looks nice and the fact that there isn't any "Ads by Google" increasing the CTR (I think).
Yeah - its looks a lot cleaner and professional. I wonder why they don't just give the same functionality across the board? And how many pageviews does it take to get that status?
Holy moly I have to disagree! I would never want Google to dump the "Ads by Google" tag line for non-premium publishers. Look at it this way: if you're getting 20 million impressions a month, you're spending big cheese to host it. You're also likely getting more than just AdSense income, and you probably have an entire staff of people. You aren't getting that kind of impression without having some good content, so Google trusts that you're not a MFA site or a fraud. If Google gets rid of the tag line for people not of the highest quality, you'll see a HUGE amount of abuse. Instead of the real content providers making an income, you'll see a ton of trolls putting up MFA sites using trickery to get clicks. No, thanks. Since I make real content, I'd like to see the following: Allow ad color blending ONLY if you have more than 10,000 impressions a month or so. Allow more ad size selection when you reach 50,000 impressions a month. Allow "forced" ad numbers for the larger ads when you hit 100,000 impressions a month -- that way you can ask for 4 ads in a large rectangle even if smart pricing says 2 is better.
I disagree with that point. Blending is a method that make google ads seem to belong to the contents, it's more user friendly and the links appear as useful resources! That's what they actually should be so users only click on them if they are interested. for all the others who try to use blending to deceive users, smart pricing will soon keep an eye on them !