Unbranded Ads (Google)

[kaizan]

What are your thoughts? Your going to get a huge increase in CTR, but boy is it going to piss off users and make them feel duped.

I will use this but position within my own add box content. Will look better than the standard branding.

[jeremy]

i'm a pretty saavy searcher. i have a finely tuned bullshit detector. but the signal to noise ratio is getting pretty damn low for a lot of search engine results. many of the offending websites are spammy adsense pages. i'm sure you all have seen them; some of you may own them (to those people: you suck). unbranded google ads will be a revelation for spammers owning those websites.

for webmasters who respect their users and don't try to trick them into clicking on ads, it will have little effect. i don't know why google would want to help spammers. it's just going to devalue adsense and adwords.

so how does...
bad for users +
bad for legitimate websites using adsense +
bad for adwords advertisers +
bad for search results
= good for google? it doesn't make sense to me.

[Gareth]

so how does...
bad for users +
bad for legitimate websites using adsense +
bad for adwords advertisers +
bad for search results
= good for google? it doesn't make sense to me.
That's an excellent point, but that sum actually does add up. The more clicks google gets; the quicker publishers campaigns expire; the quicker they have to renew; the more $$$ google gets.

I wouldn't use unbranded ads, for the pure reason that I care about my visitors.

[jeremy]

That's an excellent point, but that sum actually does add up. The more clicks google gets; the quicker publishers campaigns expire; the quicker they have to renew; the more $$$ google gets.
that might be it, i guess. what happened to "do no evil"?

[Tyler]

I must have missed something lately. Is Google offering or going to be offering unbranded ads? Ex. no "Ads by Goooogle"?

[jeremy]

i've seen it mentioned a couple places recently. screenshots could be doctored though. nothing official yet (afaik).

[Joe]

I am not sure but it looks like pixel2life is using unbranded google ads.

www.pixel2life.com

[Zane]

I must have missed something lately. Is Google offering or going to be offering unbranded ads? Ex. no "Ads by Goooogle"?
Yes basically.

The main use of this is in things like lists of lets say an arcade games website. Several of the list items could be "fake games" with the ads having content relevant descriptions. So when you click on it, it goes to another website.

You can see it used on www.i-am-bored.com. You'll notice some of the list items have the box saying AD. Theres nothing forcing you to show that its an ad though so other sites could do the same but use normal pictures.

[Andrew]

I am not sure but it looks like pixel2life is using unbranded google ads.

www.pixel2life.com

I don't see any google ads anywhere on their site...

[MaxS]

Google offers unbranded ads to premium publishers.

[aloksingh]

Only premium publishers can place ads without the google brand on them. Rest of us cannot meddle with the code given by them to us. It is against the TOS.

[charley]

Only premium publishers can place ads without the google brand on them.

I thought nobody could fiddle around with them as per the TOS for Google.

Do you have a link which provides that information you mentioned above?

[Submerge]

That is true, bigger publishers don't have to have the Google brand on them. I've seen it as well.