AdSense Certified Ad Networks. To block or not to block that is the ?

[DaStarBuG]

Hello

There seems to be a lot of opinions on blocking Google AdSense Certified Ad Networks.

Reasons for blocking go from "they are trying to sneak in the backdoor using one, or more, of these 3rd party networks" and "if I wanted crappy low-quality ads on my high-quality site I would have signed up for crappy ad networks" to "if the advertisers were that good, they'd be using AdWords"

Reasons for not blocking are that "advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space"

So if one would apply common sense and know that AdWords is an auction based ad system, then as AdSense Publisher it would be the logical choice to enable all AdSense Certified Ad Networks to increase competition and therefor Revenue.

BUT does that simple conclusion holds up in the real world?

What are your experiences with blocking AdSense Certified Ad Networks?
Did you notice an increase or decrease in earnings?

Did someone run a test and cares to share the results?

What are your opinions about AdSense Certified Ad Networks?

I am looking forward to an interesting discussion

StarBuG

[Play_Bach]

Tried both for a few days. Settled for all in.

[johnmoose]

I have em enabled too.. I tried to disable them all, eanings went up for a little while and then settled back to the previous level. So at the moment the're enabled again.

[Frost_Angel]

I removed them all for an entire month to see what would happen. Basically nothing. I saw a slight increase at first - then just more of the same earnings level as before.
Today after reading this post, I have approved them all again. We'll see if it changes anything.

[thatjen]

I have thought about blocking them but am too afraid to try it. Aren't there like 100 ad networks? I figured with that many possible companies bidding on space on my site, blocking them would hurt my revenue. Of course that's what Google wants you to think. Then I thought about blocking only certain networks - but which ones?

[Frost_Angel]

I think there were 338 when I blocked mine.

[Atomic]

Mine are all enabled.

[netmeg]

Last year I decided to stop driving myself nuts by fiddling with various dials and just leave it be. Seems to work better, and less stress on me. YMMV.

[DaStarBuG]

I mostly take the same approach as you netmeg.

However what worked best a year ago does not need to work best today.
For example about half a year ago a medium rectangle with image&text Ads earned about double the revenue of a large rectangle for me.
Today the large rectangle earns slightly more then the medium rectangle.

I would have missed that if I would not experiment with AdSense over and over again.

[johnmoose]

You're right DaStarBug. I have seen that too. I even noticed that on some pages the leaderboard isn't performing as it did in the beginning. On those pages I am testing the the linkunits again.

[ascensions]

I've found on niche specific properties, it works well to enable, but if you're a broader more general site, like a newspaper for instance, I did better blocking them.

[netmeg]

Oh I do plenty of testing on my own pages, because that's stuff I can control.

But on the AdSense side, not so much.