Dot Com Note

Google is making some changes to AdSense click regions that may affect your incomes. You see, right now the entire AdSense rectangle is a clickable region. A visitor can unintentionally click on that region and you get paid for the click. Advertisers don’t like it and they consider it as a click fraud.

After the changes, a visitor to your site must click on the underlined ad title or the advertiser’s site URL. You can check out a mock-up of the differences between the old clickable area and the new clickable area at Google Blogoscoped.

I don’t know why Google has designed the entire rectangle as the clickable area to start with. We all know that it is bad for advertising. Did they realize it after two and half years?

I am not sure what are they exactly changing. Are they going to keep the rectangle as a clickable area and pay publishers for clicks on titles and URLs only? If they do so, that will be a very, very bad move. I am hoping they won’t do that.

They should make two text links, one for the ad title and the other for the advertiser’s site URL. A click on any one of these hyperlink should be considered a valid click. Let’s wait and see how our incomes are affected by these changes.