Hi guys,

I have a few questions in relation to Google AdSense and its program policies. I was wondering if some of you have experience with this and could respond to my questions.

The complete program policies are found here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?sourceid=asos&subid=ww-ww-et-resource_box&medium=link

Extracts from program policies:

Ad Placement
Up to three ad units may be displayed on each Web site page.

Competitive Ads and Services
We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services. If you have elected to receive contextually-targeted Google ads, this would include all other contextually-targeted ads or links on the same page as Google ads. This would also include ads throughout the site that mimic Google ads or otherwise appear to be associated with Google on your site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads do not mimic Google ads. If you have elected to receive Google search services, this would include other search services on the same site and non-Google query-targeted ads. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

Questions

On some of the pages on my website I have more than three placeholders for ads and I was hoping to use them in conjunction with AdSense. My intitial thoughts were to use AdBrite for this purpose. However after reading the program policies I am not so sure if I could do this.

What does Google mean by ‘Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads do not mimic Google ads.’

Does this mean that I can sell extra ad space directly to advertisers and not through an agency like AdBrite? Or does this mean that I could publish ads through AdBrite but they should not look like Google ads?

Does Google have copyright on how text and banner ads look?

Many thanks in advance in answering my questions.

Cheers,
Ash

First off, you're generally not well-served to put more than two Google Adsense blocks. The reason is that each subsequent block tends to serve lower-paying ads than the one above it. So you might not want to consider two.

You can serve ads to advertisers as long as they're not part of a rival contextual ad network (or so is my understanding of the latter part). So I don't think you'd be allowed to use Adbrite as a result.

Next step: there really isn't a copyright as such as to how your text and banner ads look. You can make them appear pretty well any way you want in terms of colours on a website. The text itself, however, will remain the same (Arial, I think 13px.)

Hope that helps.

Hi Adam,

Thank you for the clarification. Its a pity that Google doesn't allow their rival to be on the same website. May be the anti-competition commission in the U.S and Europe will have a look at this in the future.

Cheers,
Ash

Don't worry Ash - You can use Adbrite with AdSense as it's not contextual, but just a way of arranging the buying of text links.