Google Blogoscoped

Thursday, December 13, 2007

China AdSense Open Links in New Window

Google in China announced that they will now start to open AdSense links you click in a new browser window (or browser tab, I guess)*. Keith Chan of Gspy says that this is “in [response] to the overwhelming request from publishers and to improve user experience of Chinese web surfers." From what I can make of the automatic translation of the Chinese Google post, it explains that when a new window is opened, users are not required anymore to use the back button to continue browsing the publisher’s site, thereby decreasing the chance a user accidentally leaves a site. Keith translates some more:

The Chinese market and the demands of Chinese publishers is very important to Google AdSense network. We hope to [bring] better experience to users, more revenue to publishers and more earnings to advertisers through constant improvement of our products. By this, we could achieve [a] four-win situation: users win, publishers win, advertisers win, Google wins.

AdSense – the kind of Google ads external sites may embed – currently open in the same window for the rest of the world, with Google stating that, “at this time we do not have an option to open Google ads in a new browser window. Please do not modify the AdSense ad code or alter the result of clicking on an ad on your website, as this is against our program policies."

Wonder why they change their mind in China with this policy? You may or may not like ad links to open new windows (I personally mostly prefer to use Shift+Click when I want that), but it’s definitely a feature that has been requested over and over by non-China publishers. Colin Colehour (a former contractor for Google) in the forum comments, “China is a market where Google isn’t leading so they are willing to try new things more often. See what sticks to the wall.”

[Thanks Keith & Ionut!]

*Not to be confused with traditional pop-up windows, which are trying to open automatically... this is just about a link already being clicked by the user.

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