Via Digg, news from Barry Schwartz:
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that the top blue AdWords ads have been removed from the Google search results page. But in fact, it seems to be a user by user setting. Some users will see the top blue ads and some users will not. What does it depend on? It seems it is based on your ad clicking behavior.
Do you think a third-party service that did the same for sites running AdSense would be popular? We’ve got roughly 90 million anonymous reader profiles, and we’ve been getting adclicks for about 10 days now. We could deliver “do they click on AdSense, YPN, et al” info to anyone running our Javascript. http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/09/yahoo_publisher.html
To protect our members with profiles, we’d need to exclude them from the pool of advertising targets, but that wouldn’t dramatically affect the reach of the system.
John,
I can tell you with almost complete certainty that this is not true. I have just consulted thousands of keywords of data for the weekend, and the premium ads have not shown any significant change from previous behavior.
Thanks,
-Rich
http://www.AdGooroo.com
One data point does not make a statistic, but I personally only clicked on a single ad in a Google search page, ever, and so far I still sometimes notice these blue ads at the top of the search results.
I just checked again, and yes, they’re there.
So unless that claimed dependency is that they only show the ads to people who don’t click on them (Give people a first taste, and afterwards they’ll go looking for ads elsewhere intentionally??), it cannot be a general rule.