Google has been making a great number of changes to their Adsense programs in recent months, and personally, I’m beginning to wonder if they’re heading in the right direction. It seems that Google is attempting to be too cute about their ads, while many other companies understand they’re selling advertising.

Google Adsense is all about Restriction

When you check out the Google Adsense program, you instantly become aware of how many “don’ts” there are. The company constantly chastises people about clicking their own ads, and even more importantly, about encouraging people to click. On many websites, I’m seeing competing ads that are going in a different direction.

In fact, most top-notch websites tend to carry very aggressive ads, including interstitial ones. A prime example of that which I speak of is the advertising you see on any newspaper site. The ads are flashy, they move around following your mouse. Hell, you just can’t miss the ad!

Of course the innovative part about Adsense was supposed to be the targeting. But the targeting isn’t truly automatic because it involves humans bidding on ads and making their own creatives and landing pages. On one website you might run ads for 100s of webmasters, many of whom probably don’t even know what day it is, let alone how to convert customers into sales.

Even this aspect of the program shouldn’t be a problem, but coupled with the lack of aggressiveness in ad display, and you have a program heading to a moribund status. Google has been acquiring so many companies lately, I’m almost sure we’ll see a whole new generation of Google ads, that are much pushier than the current ones. If not, it’s likely someone else will push ahead of them in the ad race.