The big news in the blogosphere lately has been the announcement that Google is going to once again screw over their publishers to cater to their advertisers. Naturally that’s not quite how they put it but it’s pretty obvious that’s what they’re doing. Darren over at Problogger broke the news (at least to me) and posted this picture to illustrate the change Google is making:

Adsense Clickable Zones

I’m kind of surprised that they didn’t just make the Ads by Google text the only clickable portion of the ads. Google is defending the move by saying it will help prevent accidental clicks and will help advertisers get more value. They do admit that publishers click through rates will probably drop but not to worry, they say, that will be made up for when advertisers increase their spending.

Wait… what?

They’re trying to argue that since the advertisers will have to pay less that they’ll just go out and pump it right back into Adsense? Having been both on both the publisher and advertiser side of things, I can tell you that’s not at all how I would react. Obviously advertisers still don’t feel like they are getting the full value from AdWords and Google has responded by making this change. Now correct me if I’m wrong but the big issue isn’t accidental clicks, it’s click fraud. Sure Google says they catch like 99.9% of it but I’d bet the house that if you surveyed advertisers they’d come back with a MUCH higher rate. So, rather than admitting it can’t deal with the click fraud problem either, Google is now trying to convince advertisers that accidental clicks are the issue while at the same time explaining to publishers that a drop in their CTR will be a good thing.

Awesome. All you AdSense publishers out there, may I suggest a few alternatives?

Many people go for google affiliate program because it is a risk free advertisement and a company pays its affiliate partners a fee from revenue made by the affiliates marketing activities. Therefore, google has become a threat to many advertising companies because of adsense and adword. One can advertise affiliate information products from reputable companies on their web site and make a lot of revenue. People can even do it from their home.

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