The Minority Report

It’s about frakkin’ time.

Personally, I’ve been wondering how some of the Adsense ads that I’ve been seeing lately have all sorts of different fonts, colors and layouts than the officially sanctioned versions. Now I’m sure you could tear apart the CSS selectors and style it that way but I’ve wondered if that violates the Adsense Terms and Conditions. Regardless, I’m glad to see that you can select the font for your ad blocks now.

Just an aside, I think Google’s been testing this for a while because I’ve seen all sorts of font faces and sizes on my sites where it used to be just straight Verdana or Arial.

It’s a good thing.

Normal Google Adsense users – those that do not have the status of a premium publisher – have always been at a severe disadvantage when customizing Adsense units. One of the major points of criticism over the year was the inability to change the default font mix that Google used to display Adsense units. You could find some tricks on the Internet to analyze the Adsense code and find out about the fonts used but you would soon be left with a choice as the size and font face differed depending on the ad unit and even on the number of ads that have been displayed in that unit.

The Inside Adsense blog made an announcement today that changes this restriction. Adsense users can now switch from the default Google Adsense font selection to either Arial, Verdana or Times. This makes it easier to use the same font for the display of Adsense units that is being used on the rest of the website. It is most likely that using the same font to display the Adsense unit and the content on the website will yield higher revenue.

Google Adsense Enables Font Selection