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Images Next to AdSense Ads: Misleading?

August 19, 2005


This thread at SitePoint brings up a subject that I think I am in the minority in. That is – I feel that placing images next to AdSense ads, specifically to make it appear that the ads and the images are in some way associated is dishonest.

I mean, you don’t control the ads AdSense serves. In some cases, you may be able to reasonably guess what the subject of the ad is going to be… but you can’t guess what the exact ad is going to be. And so, you cannot associate the completely proper image with the ad. Notice I say completely proper. It’s probably easy to come up with an image that’s somewhat proper… like, on YB, I could put baseball’s next to the ads. And that would be sort of right – but it wouldn’t be 100% right. And it wouldn’t be right all the time as we serve ads on other things.

Really, all it is is a form of trickery. Tricking people into thinking it’s not an ad, tricking people into thinking the image and the ad is associated. One thing is for sure, the ad and the image are rarely as associated as they should be. If I am tricked into clicking an ad for something that turns out to be something else… it is going to erode the trust that I had in your website and potentially cause me not to visit.

Making ads blend in is one thing – making people think they are clicking an ad for something that they’re not clicking an ad for at all – that’s a problem.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2005 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Business and My Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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One Response to “Images Next to AdSense Ads: Misleading?”

  1. August 19th, 2005 at 3:08 pm chrispian says:

    According to Adsense directly, as long as you put a bar between the ads and the images it’s "OK". I’ve been testing it on Writing Forums and they haven’t been that great. I will probably do away with them.

    I do think you have a good point though. I’m not sure which side I’m on. I haven’t really given that issue much thought.

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