We received a feedback from a user today telling us that our site’s use of Adsense was critiqued in a video lecture. I watched it and listened to what the person had to say.

The page the person assessed was the article “Earn Money from Your Hobby” – although he had an old version of the page. The version he used did not have any Adlinks, and there was a border on the large rectangle ad. We have since added Adlinks on many of our pages (experimenting on the color along the way) and have used white borders on our large rectangles.

He is an advocate of the strategy of blending the Adsense ads on the page, making the ad seem part of the content. While he gave us thumbs up mark for putting a large rectangle on the article body as well at the bottom of the page, he said that we need to lose the “article continued below” label because it alerts the visitors that ads are coming up and visitors are now more likely to skip the ad to continue reading the content.

True, some may be jolted that ads are coming up so they will move their mouse downwards to the content. But our goal is not to trick our audience into clicking on the ads. We do not like to trick our audience into thinking that what they are reading is part of the content, and because they see hyperlinks, they click on them only to find that they clicked on ads.

We made an editorial decision when we started with Adsense in June 2003 that our main priority is our audience. Our goal is to cultivate a loyal base of visitors who will come back to the site again and again. Tactics such as totally blending the ads into the content may work short-term, but we feel that it is the fastest way to turn off our visitors.

And given the nature of Adsense ads that appear on the site — many of whom are bizopps — we want to signal to our visitors that these are indeed ads. We want our visitors to separate in their minds our content with the ads that they see. Try as we might to weed many of them, sometimes ads of scams creep in, and to totally blend the content with the ad is not the smartest thing to do in the world. We will not trade in a few clicks for our integrity.

Anyway, we earn 5-digits a month from Adsense, and our large rectangles with their “article continued below” generate double digit click throughs. So unlike what the video broadcast was saying, a long term strategy of clearly identifying ads to the extent possible could actually work. As always with Adsense, the key is to experiment, experiment and experiment.