Adsense Policy Changes

January 18th, 2007 by Chris

Jensense has a summary of some new Adsense policy changes. The highlights include an explicity forbidding of images next to ads among other things.

Of the two biggest changes, the first is a change in regards to copyrighted material. It looks like Adsense is now forbidding their ads be shown in conjunction with any copyrighted material that you do not have permission to use (anything they could get a DMCA about) so content theives beware. Perhaps as part of this change, or from lobbying by teacher’s unions, Google also now forbids Adsense from being used on any site that sells essays to students. I find this change hypocritical because there are hundreds or thousands of such sites advertising through Adwords, and Google doesn’t have a problem with that. I get those ads on my site through Adsense all the time.

The other big change is an odd bit about not showing any competing/similar ad anywhere on your site if you use Google. So, supposedly, you cannot use YPN on one section of your site and Google on the other unless they look different. This seems stupid to me, and I don’t think it’ll be enforced that much. For one, maybe the person writing the terms thought “site” and “page” were interchangable, it happens. So maybe we’re reading it wrong. For the other, I don’t see Google pissing away money kicking out publishers for such a small infraction. I can only hope Google has a little more common sense than that.

The rule may have even been there way to allow more. Perhaps this was there way of saying you can run other contextual programs, just make sure they look different.

Like a new law, what this means will likely be defined by Google’s actions in regards to it.

3 Responses to “Adsense Policy Changes”

  1. Michael Gersitz  Says:

    damn, i got some work to do. Maybe if I don’t sign in to adsense it will buy me some free time. :)

  2. Michael Gersitz  Says:

    I signed in, but it didn’t tell me I had to agree to new tos updates…

  3. Mike Strand  Says:

    I already knew about the image ad changes but I can’t believe google are banning essay web sites what a farce. These are some of my best performing adsense driven web sites.

    Look like time to look elsewhere.

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