In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we’ve developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we’ll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site’s users.

When you first opt into the Ad Review Center, you’ll be able to see all placement-targeted ads currently targeted to your site, and a couple of days later you’ll be able to review placement-targeted ads that have previously run on your site. If you think an ad is not relevant for your users, you can prevent it from appearing again by blocking it in the Ad Review Center. We recommend you carefully consider the revenue impact of blocking an ad, since blocked ads won’t compete in the auction on your site, and advertisers whose ads you block may choose not to target your site again in the future.

In addition to letting publishers weigh in on the relevance of placement-targeted ads, the Ad Review Center will also help advertisers improve their placement-targeted ad campaigns. When you block an ad, you’ll be prompted to select a reason. We’ll share this constructive feedback with advertisers so they can use it to improve the quality and relevance of future ad campaigns.

As we’ve done with past features, we’re gradually launching the Ad Review Center to all publishers over the next few months. When it has been enabled for your account, you’ll see a green notification box at the top of your ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page, located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. By default, the Ad Review Center will let you review all placement-targeted ads after they have run on your site. However, if you have a strong need to manually review ads before they appear on your site, you may do so by clicking on the ‘update settings’ link in the Ad Review Center. You’ll then have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your site. Please note that you can also return to the Ad Review Center and allow a previously blocked ad, or block a previously allowed ad.

We strongly recommend you keep your review preference set to ‘auto-allow’ and review ads after they have run. Ads don’t participate in the auction while they are awaiting review, and ads that you have blocked cannot compete in the auction either. The actual revenue impact will vary in each publisher’s situation, but when using the Ad Review Center, please consider the revenue effects of blocking ads or switching from the auto-allow setting.

To learn more about the Ad Review Center, please visit the Help Center. We hope you find this new feature useful and look forward to hearing your feedback.

One of the ways ads are targeted to AdSense publisher websites is through placement targeting. Placement targeting allows AdWords advertisers to choose specific ad placements where they’d like their ads to appear. An ad placement can be an entire website or a specific sub-set of ad units within that site, such as only ad units on sports pages or all ad units at the top of the page.

Advertisers find ad placements in several ways, including by listing websites where they’d like to advertise or by searching for placements that match the themes and topics they’d like to target.

If your site is part of the AdSense network, it should automatically be visible to advertisers as an available ad placement when they search for themes or topics related to the content of your site. You can also define your own ad placements using specific sub-sets of ad units on your site.

Learn more about defining your own ad placements.

 Similar to what Google has been doing with ads in search results, they also now restricted the clickable area in AdSense (the kind of Google ads webmasters can include on their pages). Instead of allowing a click to be triggered in a broad rectangle around the text – which used to include whitespace in that area – you must now click specifically on the underlined title or the colorized URL below the snippet.

I’ve marked the old and new clickable areas below – note these are just approximations to get the point across, it’s not pixel-perfect:

With this change, Google wants to decrease accidental clicks. This has the short-term potential of lowering your AdSense revenues, but I think it’s a good move. Not only because it’s more ethical, but also because in the long run advertisers will be more likely to pay for services that work, and accidental clicks are a kind of system bug. I’m curious how much my AdSense income will drop, I guess all those of us using AdSense will see in a day or two.

Graphic/ Flash ads in the meantime I suppose aren’t affected by this, but I asked Google just in case, and will update if I get a reply

News outlets all across the media sphere yesterday published stories on YouTube’s decision to grow its pilot ad revenue sharing program to encompass interested parties in the general public.

The company, owned by Google, was known for several months to operate a limited, roughly 100-user program to formulate a system by which registered site members would be given a percentage – presumably quite small – of advertising income generated via AdSense.

According to YouTube, however, the site “will now accept partner applications from users in the US and Canada.”

Yes that means YouTube is opening up. That it’s working to satisfy a user demand. But don’t expect all who apply to gain admission to the green pastures way up there in Big G’s dominion.

What’s likely to be the case as time progresses is the company will do a sort of top-down check-off. Popular podcasts will likely get green lighted. As will generally well-known content providers. You know, YouTube “startups” (the LonelyGirl15 clones and so forth) that found themselves sizable viewerships over the course of their development. Those sorts of operations.

Maybe a good number of those viral phenomena, too. That “Evolution of Dance” synopsis that got tons of hits way back when. Tay Zonday at his “Chocolate Rain” clip. Generally speaking, the ones that surpass the million mark.

And that’s pretty much where YouTube will draw the line. No point getting in over their heads, right? Gotta keep things organized. And specialized. Everyone likes exclusives. If everyone were to be granted shares of the advertisement returns, the program would get real boring real fast. Diluted as hell. Besides, lowering the barrier to entry whilst maintaining a selective process touches the right button for many people. It makes people see the possible. That if you try hard enough – or kiss enough ass – you too can enjoy the spoils of the chosen few. And then you’ve effectively become one of the meritocratic elite! Fantastic.

And by the time all the lowly regular folk manage to sneak inside, you’ll have moved on. Pretty awesome, right?

Who knows. It’s all subjective. I get why YouTube’s playing discretionary gatekeeper, though. It’s because YouTube is YouTube. It’s not your average third-party web space with AdSense plastered all over its page(s). It’s Google’s own video land. It’s where Google does what Google wants and what Google thinks is best for you and I. No more, no less.

So let’s take it for what it is. Let’s not bother with any debate as to what’s fair and unfair about YouTube’s expanded revenue sharing system. It’s the company’s own prerogative to play its cards as it sees fit. Capishe?

Keith Chan found what looks like it might be an experimental form of Google AdSense. As the screenshot by Keith shows, there are two blue arrow icons at the bottom left of the text ad unit. Clicking the down arrow scrolls into view a couple of new ads. Keith also made a video at his GSpy blog showing this in action.

I suppose Google is still polling usage statistics at this time to see if this kind of ads may work. If I had to take a guess I’d say there won’t be a large amount of people pushing that scroll button; sometimes an AdSense ad accidentally catches your attention because it’s relevant, but the incentive to go look for more AdSense ads is rather low… they’re often not that great after all.