New rule for how many AdSense ads per page - from Jan-2013

This Quick Tip describes a new rule that AdSense is introducing to their terms and conditions, about how often the new 300x600 ad unit can be used on a single page.

Recently AdSense introduced two new sizes of ad-unit, the 300x600 Large Skyscraper and the 300x50 mobile-banner.

These aren't available from the AdSense add-a-gadget or ads-between-posts options in Blogger - but once you've been fully approved for AdSense, it's easy enough to add them to your blog by getting the code from AdSense, and installing it to Blogger the same way you install any other 3rd party code.

Personally, I like the 300x600 - it looks much more natural in several of my blogs, because it's more like the other things in the sidebar. Many of the ads it is showing at the moment are text-ads, because advertisers are still developing image-ads in the new size.  But even the text ads look better, especially in sites where I am trying to blend ads with other content. (Believe it or not, I have one niche where many of the ads work the way Google originally thought of them, providing additional information that is genuinely useful to my readers.)

But you can have too much of a good thing.

AdSense have always had a rule that each screen should have no more than

• 3 ad-units and
• 3 link-units.

Now they have announced that from 10 January 2013, the rule is that each screen can have no more than

• 1 300x600 ad unit
• 3 ad-units
• 3 link-units.

This isn't a big issue for me, but obviously there are some publishers who have taken the p*** and devoted "too much" of their screen-real-estate to ads.

Notice that there are no changes to the rules about how many ads you can show from other advertisers and affiliate programmes.

Limiting AdSense ad types for individual websites is now available

This quick tip is about a new feature that AdSense have just announced, which lets you control the types of ads that are banned - by website, instead of just for your entire AdSense account.

For a long time, I've recommended that Blogger-users who use AdSense should:

• Protect their account from malicious use, and 
• Stop sexual-content ads from showing to be sure that they meet Blogger's Terms and Conditions.

The second of these steps is basically about telling AdSense not to show certain categories of ads on your blog. One of the bug-bears with this is that, until now, it's been all-or-nothing:  you could ban ad-categories from either all your sites or none of them.     For example, one of my sites is likely to be visited by people who are unhappy with the idea of dating agencies using suggestive photos of young women in the ads.   Until now, I've had to ban this category from all my sites, to be certain that they weren't show on the sensitive site. But now AdSense have announced that they support site-level blocking:  this means that you can tell them not to show particular categories of ads on certain sites, but leave them on others. To use the feature, you will need to

• Tell AdSense what URL / domains / web-addresses you manage (if you haven't done it already) and then 
• Set up blocking for individual sites as required.

The good news is that you can still choose "all sites" - and you can block by category from just sub-domains if you want to. It maybe that you cannot use the website-level blocking yet:  Google started rolling it out in AdSense accounts late last week, and it will get to everyone eventually - I don't have it yet myself, but am looking forward to it eagerly.

Simpler - but more limited - AdSense sign-up for Blogger users

This quick tip describes an announcement from Google about an upcoming simplified process for applying to use AdSense on Blogger or Hubpages.

New simpler AdSense application process

Google AdSense have announced that from today there is a change the application process for new publishers who apply to use AdSense through a "host partner site". Currently Blogger and Hubpages are AdSense's "host partner sites" - meaning ones where the "host" provides internet space to store the monetized content, rather than the content-owner buying the internet space themselves.

They say that

"publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, ... they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense."

What this means is that if you sign up for AdSense with a host-partner, you will only be allowed to use AdSense ads on host-partner sites. If you want to use AdSense elswhere later on, then you need to do a 2-step verification process, which involves:

• Applying to become a "full" publisher
• Generating ad code,
• Implementing it on a live page of a non-host-partner site.
• Someone from the AdSense team will reviews that site and the ad in it.

If Adsense approve your other site, they give you permission to put ads on any sites other than host-partner sites (of course they still need to meet the AdSense Terms and Conditions). If they don't approve, you can still put ads onto host-partner sites (ie Blogger blogs or Hubpages pages), but you cannot use AdSense on other sites until you have fixed the problem(s) that stopped you from being approved..

Google have said that these changes don't affect people who are already approved as AdSense publishers - so I won't be able to see their effects first hand.

But I'm wondering if perhaps people who are only approved as "host partner publishers" won't have access to www.Adsense.google.com at all? This would be painful, because:

• The reports on the Earnings tab are not nearly as good as the ones in the Adsense interface.
• Some options (eg showing image-only ads, or re-using custom colour palettes, or accessing new mobile-friendly ad-sizes like 300x15) are not available from Blogger's Adsense ad generator.

Also, I'm wonder if perhaps Google have any plans to pay lower rates to people who they provide hosting and unrestricted bandwidth for?  Nothing has been said, but I can see why they would think this is reasonable.

How to sign up

If the site that you want to put AdSense ads on has a blogspot address   (www.example.blogspot.com), then the only way you can now sign up for AdSense is from Blogger's earnings' tab.

If it has a custom domain, then I don't know if it's possible to use the regular AdSense sign-up process, or if you have to use the Blogger one.

Either way, I still recommend that you should protect your AdSense account from malicious use, and also make sure that the ads you display meeting Blogger's Terms and Conditions too.