Adsense Introduces Ability Change Font Size in Ad Units: Will Advertiser Interest Go for a Toss?

Google Adsense has been fundamental in enabling a lot of web aspirations take shape. There is no denying the paradigm shift it brought on to web publishing and online advertising since its launch a few years back. However, while it helped a lot of publishers earn truckloads of money, it was also known for its stringent ad policies. Most of these were guided by keeping advertiser interests at the forefront and doing everything possible to avoid low quality clicks and leads.

This meant publishers had very little control over the ad units that Google provided except for changing colors to match that of the text. Today in a move that would change the whole deal it has introduced the ability to change font sizes of ad units as well.

In an announcement on their blog, the Adsense team said:

We’re now happy to announce the launch of a related feature you’ve been asking for — the ability to change the font size of the text in your ad units. You can now select from small, medium, and large font sizes for ad units on pages in Latin-character languages.

This follows the February update to ad units wherein one could change the type faces to match that of the site’s content. Both these privileges if I’m not wrong were reserved for large publishers who drove majority of Google’s revenues (Web 18 in India for instance). Now these features have been enabled for all publishers.

I wonder how this will impact the business for advertisers. In fact, one also begins to feel this as a move borne out of a drop in performance revenue that Google might be earning. The feature itself has been long requested by a lot of publishers so as to blend Google’s contextual ads better with their content and thereby drive more click troughs. However, higher click troughs also posed the danger of these clicks being low quality. Site visitors tend to click on ads inadvertently if they are not aware it is an ad thereby rendering the visit bad for the advertiser from an ROI perspective.

Wouldn’t this move expose advertisers to such a risk?

From Google;s point one can assume that most web users might now have become ad blind to the existing ad units of Adsense after having seen them on almost all websites that they visit these days. Therefore, in order to drive performance, this probably was a natural progression that they always envisaged. However, the fact that the default font size would now be medium instead of small doesn’t add weight to the above point as much as the dwindling revenues theory does.

• Will these actually bring better performance of ads?
• these changes increase publisher revenues?
• these impact the quality of leads and traffic for advertisers?
  

These are the important questions that would be on digital marketers and web publishers mind now.