Google Adsense Enables Multiple Ad Networks, Adwords Advertisers Lose

4 days ago, Adsense publishers received a letter from Google, informing us that there are new great featured coming up. Enabling multiple ad networks in AdSense should allow you to maximize revenue.

You’ll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

Also…

To ensure the quality of the ads appearing on your sites, we’re certifying all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You’ll also have control over which networks can show ads on your pages — you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely. This means you can continue to show ads from only AdWords advertisers if you’d like.

This is quite innovative, if you remember, a few years ago Google disallowed displaying any other ads on the page, other than Adsense. We couldn’t use contextual ads from other networks, but eventually Google gave in and allowed contextual ads such as Adbrite and Chitika on same pages. Now we see that Google is taking one more step further and allows ads from other networks inside their own ad units. Did Google sense that they may lose out to other Ad-networks providers?

Right now, Publishers in North America and Europe can allow ads from Google-certified ad networks to appear on their pages, but once the service goes out of Beta, it will be available worldwide to ALL Adsense users. Let’s hope it won’t get stuck in “beta” like Gmail.

And who REALLY benefits from this change?

Obviously, Google itself, not the publishers and allow me to explain. If before that, Adwords advertisers would only compete against each other, this feature takes one step ahead and extends the competition, by tripling the market’s size. So, if previously there were only 5 people bidding on a certain keyword, now there will be 15 or more. Automatically, competition drags higher bid per click, if you want to keep your ads showing ads. As Adwords advertiser I can tell you that I am not going to love the idea of having a herd of new advertisers suddenly competing on my cheap keywords. As an Adsense publisher, I don’t believe “maximizing” the revenue will really take the Adsense earnings to a whole new level.

For now, thumbs up for Google, you came up with a great idea how to milk the crisis!



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