About a week back, Google announces change to their Adsense Ads units. If you noticed in the past, the clickable area for Adsense ads units encompassed the whole background of the individual ads. Now, clicks will only worked if you click on the title and URL of each ad.

Well, it seems that this move by Google once again annoyed many Adsense publishers who see a immediate decrease in their Adsense earnings.

In their own words:

“We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers…..This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the user’s overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.”

While CTR for many publishers will be down in the short term, I think this move bodes well for the whole PPC industry as a whole. This is good for visitors who are genuinely looking for information as well as good for advertisers looking for genuine returns on their money spent. However, I wonder how it would actually affect those who deal with Adsense arbitrage.

In the meantime, I feel publishers will be looking for other alternatives to boost their flagging Adsense earnings.
So what are your views on this?