AdSense Alert - New Formats Need Attention!

Have you seen the new AdSense ad formats yet? If not, you can find out about them and see them in the official "Inside AdSense" blog. You'll definitely want to pay attention here folks.

If you haven't looked at your own site lately, you might want to go and ogle your own ads. Last week I noticed the leaderboard ads on my site were in the new format, but it gave me something of a shock to realize that this new format (which I wasn't expecting) made the ads look too much like the content on my site. That's because I use a blended palette for my text ads, with no border. The background is the same colour as my site, so is the text and title, with the links being the same colour as normal site links (blue). I realized right away that I'd need to change my ad colour selections because of this new format that AdSense has released. Am I happy about it - nope, not at all. I would much rather that adsense release the ad format, but gave publishers a choice of whether or not to use it, or to stay with the old style ads. As it stands now, if publishers don't pay attention to their ads on their own sites, they may end up being disabled for having ads that look like content, which is against AdSense Program Policies - or at the very least, receive a warning about their ad style. I would hope that AdSense would issue warnings to publishers, since they are the ones who instituted this change with no prior notice to publishers.

So, my warning to ALL publishers is to check your sites and look at  your ads carefully to ensure they don't look like your content too much, and also double check the new formats to ensure they don't look like the ads from other advertisers. In the image posted on the Inside AdSense blog, the square ad formats appear to resemble ads from at least one other ad serving platform - a fair bit more than they did before.

It's up to publishers to ensure their sites, ad styles and ad placements do not contravene policy, so spend some time this week checking your own sites for this new ad format - and take action before they have to issue you a warning...or worse, simply disable your account.