I want to know who is clicking on the google ads that are placed in the middle of paragraphs, before the answer you need to find, and anywhere else they can be jammed on the web page? Okay, maybe I’m a touch intolerant of ad sense. But I have a good reason why. For example, I too fell prey to the lure of googles billions, thought I could make money and implemented google ad sense into the yellowfish website.
Hard as I would try, I could not get the ad sense placements to stop competing with the content. Now here’s where my tolerance started to go south. We are Yellowfish Technologies, an Information Technology firm. Ad sense decided to pick the word ‘yellowfish’ and proceeded to list out crap ads about water, feeding, fish types, yellow belly fish flounder and you name it. It was ridiculous to see this type of information being offered on our technology home front. The competitors it also advertised was another story. I removed ad sense from the Yellowfish site. I guess now I’m not such a big fan, but the bad news is, it continues to haunt me.
I am a victim. I really am. Bad google advertising makes me lose track of what I was looking for. Usually the rest of something interesting… When I see these odd ad blocks hogging up valuable real estate on the web page where the content suppose to be, I can’t believe they are in such big use. The ads are just plain distracting and side-track you. Honestly, I do not know anyone who would stop to click further on them. The Yellow belly fish flounder incident comes back loud and clear.
I am now convinced most people who use and those who over-use ad sense do not pay attention to what actually shows up on their site under these ads. I was having a victim moment the other day and noticed the link options very strange. I think it was out of irritation and to prove it’s all irrelevant stuff displayed in those ad sense links, but I clicked on a couple as an experiment. All 5 of the links I chose brought me to a page without graphics and that was just a series of more random links, too many choices about the same thing, with an occasional link that made a small amount of sense. It’s just as I thought…useless. Oh, and by-the-way, I never went back to that site and found another that delivered information not ads. I book marked it.
I know people are just trying to make an extra buck off google hoping someone clicks on one of them and earns them extra money, but geeze, good sites are falling prey and putting all google ads above the fold and the important stuff below. I can barely read what’s I came there for. To all you over-users of google ad sense, please evaluate if it’s worth switching out your business content that should be easy to find and read for ads on things generally irrelevant and out of your control. Do you really want visitors leaving your site to go somewhere else anyways?
