Google Quietly Adjusts AdSense Pricing

from the interesting-timing... dept

When Google launched their AdSense contextual advertising program last year, a lot of people pointed out that contextual advertising makes a lot less sense than search advertising. When someone is doing a search, they're looking to go somewhere else, and thus, much more likely to be interested in relevant paid listing results. When someone is reading content on a page, however, they're in "browsing" or "reading" mode, not searching for somewhere else to go. So, it seems pretty clear that contextual ads on content pages are likely to be less useful than search ads. Google, however, insisted this wasn't true, and actually made some statements early on after the launch, claiming that contextual ads were doing just as well as search ads. It seems that now, a year later, they're quietly admitting that wasn't true. Lost in all the buzz over Gmail was the fact that Google was changing the ad rates for contextual ads, basically admitting they weren't doing as well as search ads, and should be priced differently.