For the last few months, I've worked on stripping out my Adsense ads from one of my blogs (Maven Mapper's Information self indulging link is in my profile :).
Tonight, I stripped out my adsense ads, and republished.
I noticed that I was getting a small box of Google Adsense ads in my sidebar despite the fact that I had no adsense script left in my template.
I did a lot of scrolling and flipping back and forth between code and design view in dreamweaver.
I finally identified the culprit.
Amazon was running Adsense on my Website!
Now I heard back in February that Amazon was going to launch a contextual advertising play of their own with lots of fan fare, but I haven't seen the results. They were hoping to reduce their own dependence on Adsense.
Tonight, once all my other adsense script was removed, suddenly my Amazon Search box that I had in my sidebar, mostly for personal quick Amazon book searches, was replaced with a google adsense ad.
Now you can bet this was not my adsense account number. However, it struck me that something about this didn't seem to be on the up and up.
It raised a number of thorny theoretical questions that I won't test, but will pose:
- What happens if I click on an adsense ad from Amazon on my website? My Adsense code is gone, will my site get shut down from adsense? (I don't think so, but how accurately does Google track clicking activity from my site)
- How many other people see their Amazon Associate ads turn into Adsense ads?
- How do I prevent competitive ads when it comes from Amazon's account?
- Is it an anti trust activity for Google to allow Amazon to violate TOS and disallow it for all the small fish? (this concept comes to me everytime I see a big site doing something that I'm not allowed to do)
- What is the limit to the adsense account sharing business model? (ergo there are a number of schemes cropping up where sites offer you to put your adsense account number in somewhere and they will rotate ads in under your account on their site. I've never tried one of these programs out of fear that I couldn't control the site and my account would get shut down based on something that happened there out of my control. However this is essentially what Amazon is doing, putting their adsense on my site and trusting that I won't run porn or something there that would violate TOS.)
- How many other business have built "Buttons Made For Adsense" (B MF A) which is kind of like a Samuel Jackson Acronym for Bad M----- F----- A------
Well its a strange thing that I hadn't noticed before. Has anyone else run across this, read about it or something. I tried a few google searches on it, but came up short in the information/press release/ forum complaint department.
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