AdMoolah News and Views

JenSense is reporting that Google is starting a beta program to experiment with rich media ads in its AdSense program. The rich media ads include interstitial ads, expanding ads and floating ads. Google started AdSense using the most unobtrusive ads possible – text ads. Over time they added graphical ads and then animated ads. Now they have gone whole hog and added these new rich media ads. The only thing left after this is pop-ups.

I find this very typical of Google. They have a basic philosophy about something – in this case, ads should be unobtrusive – and then they find they can make money from something and the philosophy shifts. In the latest version of the Our Philosophy page Google stated that “Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.” On the What is Google AdSense page they state “Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, unobtrusive Google ads”. I think that expanding ads, floating ads and interstitial ads are certainly a distraction and obtrusive. I guess Google will have to change their philosophy again when they roll these changes out on a larger scale. The same thing happened with their philosophy when they launched Google Talk.

There is no official word from Google on these new ads. We will have to wait and see whether they roll them out on a larger scale and if they eventually become available to all publishers. I’m sure other ad networks which currently offer rich media ads are worried that Google will start dominate in this field too, as they tend to do.