Disappointed over occasional display of 1-3 ads in a skyscraper

Google should fill in remaining spots with public service ads

[ThatAdamGuy]

I currently have my AdSense ads showing in a div box to fit in with the rest of my sidebar, and one of the unfortunate side effects of this design is that when Google shows fewer than four ads, there's a bunch of extra white space.

I'd like for publishers to have the option to allow Google to fill up the 'extra' spaces with public service ads.

What do you think?

[chiyo]

good idea.. but only if it's not compulsory! The public service ads ive seen are very irrelevant and out of place on the site we are using adsense in. If the public service ads were more international that would be better.

[ams_david]

Egads.. please no more public service ads.

They are always a 100% mismatch for the content, and can be a considerable worry for websites that have a large NON-AMERICAN audience.

I'd be gratefull for an option to turn off public services ads and just show a big blank area. When google has paid ads, show them. When google does not have paid ads, leave the surfer alone and give them a cleaner experience.

[ewanfisher]

If Google showed white space before the content related ads there would be some confusion wither the ads were working or not. I agree with the fact that the ads are American targeted. But what ads could google show instead?

[killroy]

There are plenty of global charities, jsut think of human rights organisations, greenpeace, that sort of stuff...

SN

[Equiano]

I am seeing some "Public Service" type Ads popping up in my Adsense.

It may be that in a very tangential way Google has determined that these ad are related to my web site and these are actually paid for ads, but with very little information on the nuts and bolts of the content targetting it is difficult to say.

[Imaster]

I would say either have the option of filling in those blankies with PSA's or just like other advertising companies offer, provide us with the option to run our own text ads in place of those blankies.

I would probably run text ads of my own internal pages.

I am not sure if this is within its rules which say that there should not be any other text based advertising. But this one seems good to me.

[cyt0plasm]

If you want to know if an ad is "Paid" or not, right click on the link. If it goes to anything other than googlesyndication.com, it's not a paid ad. After all, google has no way to track it.