Last night, I, as well as hundreds of other AdSense publishers received an email from Google offering them access to the "Custom Placement Packs" program if they would just add a larger banner ad unit to their site. Here is the full email:
Subject: Add 300x250 AdSense units to your site
Dear Publisher, After a recent review of your site, we would like to include seroundtable.com in our custom placement packs program. Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers. We would like to feature your site more frequently in these advertiser packages, but to do so, we need you to place more image and text-enabled medium rectangle ad units (300x250) on your site. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats to see a sample of the medium rectangle unit. The medium rectangle is the most demanded size among our brand advertisers that utilize these packages for both text and image ads. These advertisers want to ensure they reach visitors on high quality sites like yours, and are willing to bid more for ads prominently displayed on these sites. They require that the units be placed "above the fold" on a page so that the ads are immediately visible to your site's visitors without scrolling down. If you decide to add medium rectangle units to your site, please notify us by replying to this email so that we can begin featuring your site in more of our advertiser packages. We also recommend you use the newly launched ad placements feature to define your ad slots to advertisers so they can bid on specific placements on your site. For instructions on how to create ad placements, please visit https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50691.
My initial response, was a quick reply asking, and I quote:
How much can I make on this?
Seriously, you do not tell people to add larger banner ads to their site without giving them some data. Am I crazy here? Whoopie! I get to place some of Google's largest brand advertisers on my site! So they pay how much more? That is what I want to know.
I thought I was special, but it looks like dozens, if not hundreds of other AdSense publishers received the same email.
Threads at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld are buzzing with it.
The first response to the DigitalPoint Forums thread was, "I would ask them how much more money I am gonna make to see if its worth while." Duh.
Some suspect this has to do with Google wanting more ad space, real estate, to test the video ads they recently talked about.
I will tell you this, I will watch the results of the threads and let you know how it works out for them.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.
