AdBrite has become fairly popular on sites. You can see it on Shadows In Motion. It allows people to easily buy ad space on your site, thus placing relevant text ads at whatever position the AdBrite “Your Ad Here” block is placed.
For an example go ahead and click on the “Your Ad Here” link. As far as I know there’s nothing wrong with me encouraging you to do so because I get no payments for people clicking that link. What you’ll see are my site’s stats (daily page views and unique users), the costs for daily, weekly and monthly ads and other information. You’ll also see some Alexa stats*.
Now Google has directly entered into AdBrite’s “territory” by offering an identical service. You can now place Google Adsense ads that have a “Advertise on this site” link within the AdSense ads. You can also customize the landing page that someone loads to after clicking on “Advertise on this site”. The customizations include adding your site logo, customizing the landing page’s colors and adding a message to the page.
From this customized landing page the interested buyer can easily sign up for Google AdWords. If they do so, the ad that they make will specifically be for your site and will only display on your website. They bid on keywords for your site, as they do with any AdWords ad, and those bids will compete with other content-targetted AdSense ads. Here’s the full information on Google’s new competing service.
It’s important to ask ourselves what this means. Will Google suddenly say that any AdBrite ads are not allowed on our site, now that they have this competing service? That would be an extreme strong arm tatic in this blogger’s point of view but I sure would not be surprised. Google has always been extremely touchy about the ads that appear on a site that runs AdSense.
I’m getting an uncomfortable feeling about this. I feel the day approaching where we’ll be locked into Google only ads if we want to run AdSense at all. The “all eggs in one basket” approach has never been a good idea, but many people rely on their AdSesense revenue. If Google continues designing ad systems that directly compete with existing services - such as AdBrite - and their Terms of Service continues forbidding any ads that directly compete with Google’s ads then these people may not have a choice but to place all of their revenue hopes on one company.
There are other considerations for this. Is it legal - or even ethical - for Google to effectively strong arm smaller ad companies such as AdBrite off of existing sites? Or will Google take a leaner approach to these “Advertise On This Site” ads so as not to effectively strong arm AdBrite off of sites that wish to use AdSense?
Time will tell, I suppose.
~Mysk
* Note: Some site owners, myself including, put no stock in Alexa’s stats. Take their information with a bit’ol salt.