Michi Knows

I’ve been noticing this in own site’s ads recently: Google has been playing around with a new look and feel. The new image based (or is it?) ”Ads by Google” should go a long way in protecting visitors from misleading ads (the ones that are cleverly disguised to look like regular links).

This couldn’t come at a better time. Right now, everybody is copying Google. Not just in terms of business models, but in visual look. These days, it’s increasingly less obvious when you see an embedded Google Ad versus a competitor. They’ve all copied the same look and feel.

This in turn creates major ad blindness. While the folks in the Google blog say that:

After extensive testing and research, we’ve found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers.

But in reality, any new look and feel would perform better. Ad blindness is the single biggest threat to online advertising. As a user becomes more blind to ads, short sighted publishers will dump on more ads (think Myspace). This in turn fuels further ad blindness and the cycle repeats. Worse yet, because Google Ads appear across many sites, this ad blindness follows a user around across their daily Internet Journey ™.

For you AdSense users, here’s a cool article on how to fight ad blindness (official instructions). Google would be wiser to automate this type of color rotation into their ads.

Edit: Yep, it works… Notice how my ads change as you refresh.