Blend in or stand out?

what is everyone using?

[StuntasticAudi]

Currently i have my adsense ad units blended into the page, they do not stand out and are just plain black text no background no border...is it a better idea to have them stand out? making it different color and have a border?

[Tearabite]

i went from totally blended to a mixutre of blended and contrasting.. it seems that CTR went up, but it's hard to tell for sure because my site has low traffic..

[Thez]

Blended as well as possible

[europeforvisitors]

Why not scroll back and look at the many previous threads on this topic?

[G_Smitty]

Blended with site has always worked best for me.

[Andrew Bassett]

I started with blending, but I've decided on contrasting; that's how Google itself always succeeded with its ads.

Of course I haven't had a click in weeks, but meh, I only have about 20 visitors who come daily.

[fredw]

Because of the look and feel of my sites, I have half-and-half. I have completely blended ads within my content area but more conventional ads with borders in my left-nav. I've only really recently started tracking my ad placements with custom channels, but they both seem to do equally well.

[celgins]

I use a little of both.

I blend ads in the middle of the screen in content areas.

I use more colors and borders on ads in the left nav, bottom nav, etc.

[annej]

I blend in terms of background and text colors. I make the border color the same as the background color just because it gives a cleaner look. But I do put a thin border around the large rectangle that I float to the right in the text of my articles. I don't know if it hurts me but I feel it looks better and makes the article more readable.

[brickwall]

I use this general guideline:

If content is good read, blend
If content is not good read, highlight

[Alex_Miles]

Blending gets me up to 6% CTR, not blending 15%+

But when I say 'not blending' theres rather more to it than that, and a lot of factors on the page itself need adjusting to within quite specific parameters.

[BillyS]

OK, here is a response that is based on billions of page views.

Look at what Google does... (they blend)