Adsense on Google Gadgets

[PanUK]

Just took a look at some Google Gadgets and noticed some showing Adsense underneath.

This is not legal right?

[RonPK]

I'm no expert on the Terms and Conditions, but I can't find any explicit prohibition. Neither in the AdSense terms nor in the Gadget terms.

The AdSense bot can easily crawl gadgets in order to determine their subject, so there shouldn't be any technical obstacle.

Why should it be illegal?

[MyNewPC]

This is the first I've heard of Google Gadgets and based on the research I just did, looks like AdSense is legal but I think it is really stretching the intent of the AdSense Program Policies.

I chose the Geo IP Tool from Google Gadgets. I generated the code and then clicked on the link on the screen that was generated. There are two AdSense blocks on that page. Unless the webmaster added AdSense after Google approved his site as a Google Gadget and began linking to it from a Google hosted site, Google has approved it.

[stardoc]

Well I was in an Adsense conference in London recently. There was an interesting presentation by adsense product manager about the future of adsense and it stressed a lot on Google gadgets being the way forward for interactive ads. I guess they are running a very exclusive alpha at the moment with some airline companies for on-line bookings. From what I saw in the presentation it did seem to be a very promising feature, especially for large branded advertisers.

Edit: Here is an announcement from adsense blog [adsense.blogspot.com...]

[RonPK]

@MyNewPC: I can't see any ads in that gadget. There are ads on the page behind 'more info', but that is an ordinary web page. Gadgets are the thingies on people's iGoogle homepages.

@stardoc: interactive ads would be a new type of AdSense ads, after text ads, image ads, and the upcoming video ads. There's a thread on those over here [webmasterworld.com] ;)