Why Did Google Ban Similar-Looking Ads?

Someone in the Digital Point AdSense forum asked me why I thought Google has banned AdSense publishers from displaying similar-looking ads on their sites. I have no special knowledge why, but I can think of two good reasons:

1. Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) must be coming out of beta soon. YPN is perhaps the only contextual advertising network that could give Google a run for its money. By banning similar-looking ads (YPN ads look a lot like Google ads — let's face it, there are only so many ways you can lay out small text ads) it will make AdSense publishers think twice about signing up with YPN (which is currently only open to US-based publishers) and make it much harder to rotate ads to see which ad network works better on a given site. (It's not that you can't do it, but you can't display AdSense ads on any page on the site if YPN is displayed on any page… so you have to rotate based on time of day and make the rotation work across the entire site.)
2. It's a small step in the ongoing war against low-quality sites. Ads-that-are-not-ads are often found on the so-called “Made for AdSense” (MFA) sites. This change and the recent ban on images next to ads can both be considered small strikes against such sites. You might wonder why Google is doing it in small steps: I think it has to do with revenue protection. So much of Google's income is tied to AdSense that they have to make changes slowly, so as to not cause a big drop in income as publishers abandon AdSense for something else (not YPN — it seems to be pickier than AdSense about many things).

As an aside to the new rules, what does AdSense consider a “site” — is a subdomain a separate site from its parent domain? There is no formal definition of this, but the general practice seems to be to consider subdomains separate from parent domains. So it should be OK to try out YPN and AdSense on different subdomains at the same time.

Sponsored Link: For help with AdSense, Uncommon AdSense is a great resource.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and

Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…

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