Is Google feeling the recession pinch ?

I first thought of doing a good research to back my title but later abandoned it, since once I prep this story with data and figures, it no longer remain novel. This is just a small observation over last one week when I received two e-mails from Google relted to adsense. I dont remember getting many e-mails over the last 2 years, the time I signed up for an adsense account so it came as a little surprise.

Today I logged in my account and noticed that the home page got some UI tweaks as well. So the e-mails + the changes at the adsense page might add up to the theory that Google is investing time adn effort on this business viz. adsense.

Here’s the screen shot of the new home page.


So gone is that ‘Gardening’ graphic which was too subtle to even notice. And I never saw it changing for all of those 2 years. The new one is much more clear and promotes the various places where you can place an ad. Infact the ‘feed’ thing has been there for a while but it was never promoted so explicitly. After Google acquired Feedburner, people knew that ads would come but it did take them some time.

Without making this story long, let me come to the two e-mails. First one came about a week back and it talked about ways to make more money throuhg adsense. On a closer look, its ‘Adsense Newsletter’, but either my memory is failing me or I am just being careless but I do not remember seeing the newsletter too often.

Here’s what the title of the newsletter says : “AdSense Newsletter – Optimization and You”. Then it lists some of the ways which you can make use of and though its a very focused and tidy newsletter, it comes straight to two point viz.

1. Place up to three ad units, two link units, two search boxes per page
2. Place your ads above the fold

Thats very very focused campaign. No metrics jargon, no analytics pitch, plain simple tips.

Then comes the 2nd mailer, which talks about “Introducing interest-based advertising” and the request us to update your ‘privacy policies’ since as per Google

……………….Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310 ……….

So all of this makes me think that Google has suddently pumped up the action on adsense front. All of this doesn help adsense users like me but I guess Google is feeling the pinch too.

Agree ?