This post is not meant to bash Adsense, nor am I writing it because I've found a better alternative.  The point of this post is to illustrate how the advertising marketplace is changing and it appears to be adopting methods to fight ad blindness, yet Adsense ads have remained largely unchanged since day one.  I think that there is more money to be earned by publishers and advertisers if Google would decide to place images next to their text ads.

It Works

Not too terribly long ago it was a method used by Adsense publishers to place their own small images next to their Adsense text ads.  This greatly increased the CTR (click through ratio) in almost every single case.  However, because publishers were adding their own images, Google was unable to moderate the implied related content.

A few bad apples ruined it for the rest of us when they started placing questionable images next to their Adsense Ads.  Probably having a bigger impact was that publishers were placing unrelated images next to the Ads in question.  Then an unsuspecting visitor would click through on an add expecting something else and then immediately bounce out.  Obviously Google doesn't want to piss off Advertisers by sending them unrelated traffic.

How To Fix The Problem

Google could implement their own program to allow Advertisers to upload their own authorized images to be displayed next to their ads.  This way Google could moderate what images were being used before approving the ad and know that these were not being changed by the publishers to drive unrelated traffic.

Who's Doing It Before Google Adsense

Already there are a number of publishers that allow images to be uploaded and used along text advertisements.  The two that stand out the most are Chitika and Facebook Ads.  Both of these programs have already proved to be wildly successful for both their Advertisers and Publishers.

Facebook Ad w/ Image

I've used them both and can attest that as an Advertiser I don't mind spending a bigger budget with lower cost per clicks.  And if I'm controlling the images then I know that the traffic can be just as interested in buying what I'm selling.  I forsee Google making some changes, soon, to adjust to this change in the online advertising marketplace.

We have to fight ad blindness somehow.

Usually I'm not the type of person to interact with anyone on Facebook.  Generally you'll find me accepting friend requests and then a few times a month looking at peoples pictures, just to see what they have been up to.  However, my wife is a completely different bird, always updating, and constantly playing the flash games available.  The latest game she started playing was Farm Town and she dragged me right along for the ride.

Farm Town was created by a company called Slash Key and contains the basic elements of what made Sim Farm, developed in 1993 so much fun.  It's all about planting crops, developing a plan, and trying to earn enough money to purchase the Mansion instead of the run down shack you start out with.  Thanks to my wife, I am now playing it almost as much as she is and find myself logging into Facebook just to check on my crops to see if they need harvesting.

Farm Town is not nearly as complicated as Sim Farm was and the options are fairly limited.  Furthermore the creators of Farm Town have integrated a leveling system to keep players logging in and interacting.  Usually experience points are awarded for helping out on friends farms, planting crops, or plowing fields.  To really start moving through the levels though takes coins, which you will use to purchase buildings and fences.  Everytime you buy a higher level item you gain massive amounts of experience points, then the process starts all over again.

Sim Farm

Well, thanks to this friendly reminder of how much a farm simulation can be, I decided to hunt down Sim Farm.  Thanks to the interwebs you can still find this abandonware available for free download, but requires some serious tweaking to play on a new computer.  DosBox came in handy and after figuring out it's install I was ready to start playing Sim Farm again for the first time in 16 years.

The only problem I've ran into when running Sim Farm on Vista through DosBox is the window size.  It tried tweaking the config file as suggested on the wiki's, but still no luck.  The solution I use, but causes some graphical errors, is to alt-enter, which plays in full screen mode.  Generally this works, but from time to time will cause everything briefly look like  a lake.  Small price to pay.