europeforvisitors - 6:08 pm on Mar 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think there is a problem with what people are calling blending in. I just checke EFVs site, his ads blend in the same way mine do. He has a white background and uses the same blue color in his links.

Actually, some of the AdSense links are blue and some are green, since I use the default AdSense link colors.

And the ads aren't blended in; they're set off from the navigation and content areas of the page with horizontal rules (not to mention white space on either side). They're also a different color than the navigation bars and columns: the ads are white, while navigation areas of my pages are grey.

This is just my experience, but I blended mine in the November timeframe and my CTR doubled overnight. It's against the TOS to make public eCPM, but mine is as good as any I've seen published here.

I didn't blend my ads in, but I did change the background color from rotating pastels to white when I added 160 x 600 display skyscrapers to my pages (partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to make the display ads stand out more). My CTR is exactly the same as it was before the change, which makes it obvious that--because of the way I've set the ads off with horizontal rules and a color that contrasts with my navigation bars--users aren't mistaking my ads for navigation links or content. (Maybe that's one of the reasons I haven't had any big drops in EPC that could be blamed on poor conversions and "smart pricing.")