Ad blending: is it ethical?

Only four more days until Make Easy Money with Google is published, and I can hardly contain my excitement! But I digress. Today's topic is ad blending, all the range with AdSense publishers.

Ad blending happens when an AdSense publisher chooses an ad color scheme that makes the ads blend into the rest of the site. This usually means no borders, a background color identical to the page's background color, and text colors that match the surrounding text. The only thing the publisher can't do is affect the color of the “Ads by Google” line, which is always displayed in a contrasting color to the background color.

Some publishers are claiming huge increases in their clickthrough rates after a switch to blended ads. Why? Probably because the visitor confuses the ads with site content. Some publishers even go so far as to cleverly position pictures above horizontal ads (though I suppose it could work for vertical ones, too) to make it look like the ads are merely captions.

So is ad blending ethical? Google seems to have no problems with it, publishers who have asked Google about it have been told it's OK to do it so long as they're not actively enticing visitors to click those ads with wordage like “click the ads to support this site” or so on. I must admit I have mixed feelings about the subject. I mean, I'm all for things that increase clickthrough rates on my sites, but I don't want to deceive my visitors, either. I don't know what the advertisers think, they may not care as long as they're getting semi-qualified visitors, which presumably if AdSense is working correctly and targeting ads to the right content is what those visitors will be. I've got some blended link units at the top of most of the pages, but those aren't quite the same in my opinion, because clicking on a link unit just opens a new page — the visitor still has to actively click on one of those ads. The non-link ads aren't blended, and I think I'll leave them like that for now. I'd like to hear what others have to say, though, so feel free to leave some comments.

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