Google Adsense Appears to Have Lifted 3 Content Unit Limit

[Ryuzaki]

There's whisperings going around, all starting from a currently tiny thread on the official Adsense Help Forum:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/Yvfq5Er17zg;context-place=forum/adsense

It's quick and easy. Someone spotted that the Adsense policy no longer mentions a limit to the number of ad units you can use per page. It used to say:

Ad limit per page
Currently, on each page AdSense publishers may place:

• Up to three AdSense for content units
• Up to three link units
• Up to two search boxes

Which you can see on the Wayback Archive.

Now, it says this:

Valuable inventory
Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content. Furthermore, the content you provide should add value and be the focal point for users visiting your page. For this reason, we may limit or disable ad serving on pages with little to no value and/or excessive advertising until changes are made.​

It sounds like they have a crawler together for Adsense that can measure a physical real estate ratio of ads to content.

What are the implications?

It seems like a site like my own could dump some of these lower paying CPM networks and test if additional Adsense blocks can outpace them even with lower CPC bids on additional units.

It seems like sites that have a video and one sentence, surrounded by three ad units may have those reduced to one or even zero, automagically.

These viral sites and big news sites with 18 ads from Adsense, CPM networks, Wallpaper ads, Auto-play videos, native blocks at the bottom of the content... they may even find their Adsense being restricted if it truly is based on all ad units and not just Adsense.

This is a happy day for some of us and likely very scary for a lot of others.

 

[Sutra]

That is very interesting. Would definitely be worth trying instead of having to find all these different ad networks.

 

[The Kloser]

These viral sites and big news sites with 18 ads from Adsense, CPM networks, Wallpaper ads, Auto-play videos, native blocks at the bottom of the content

Guilty as charged This is a great news. Adding one more ad at the very bottom of the page brb...

 

[secretagentdad]

Adsense is an auction.

Googles systems optimize for average cases. If you're average you're not maximizing your value.

Less is more, more often then not. It never ceased to amaze me at how good adsense was at cannibalising itself. Bad ad units compete against hiring paying ad units they don't just add more RPM every time.

That said I haven't looked at this stuff in years, maybe its different now. Test test test. Never assume.