[Mitch]

Starting Friday night and extending into Sunday morning. Google's AI will be experimenting with placing ads in new places around the forum. Those of you who are currently excluded from seeing ads will be seeing ads during Google's AI crawl.

[Mitch]

The experiment is live.

[Mitch]

I'm already finding it placing ads in not great places, hopefully, it'll get less annoying and smarter as the experiment goes on.

[Borek]

So far I have not seen more than 2 ads per page, vertical ones only, and yes, the placements weren't perfect, like when it got between the header and the menu (instead of below the menu).

I wonder what it really does. The only metrics it can register is the short timescale revenue and my bet is that it doesn't care so much about the logical placement and how the page looks like for users, as these are not easy to evaluate. So if the ad yields more clicks, but scares users away and the effect is not visible immediately but only in the long run, final effect could be disastrous.

[Arkcon]

I don't see the vertical ones in Microsoft edge, like I used to see in IE, when I browsed the Chemical Forums at work.  The horizontal ads I see are pretty unobtrusive.  I usually use Firefox, and I don't see any ads there.

[Borek]

Sigh, I meant horizontal ones.

And see the attachement - menu is shifted down by an ad, it would make more sense to have the menu under the header and the ad just above the breadcrumbs (Chemical Forums > Chemistry Forums for Students > High School Chemistry Forum)

[Mitch]

Right or make new menu buttons that can float there.

The revenue the AI is generating is frighteningly small. I'm glad we're only going to run this experiment for a day.

[Arkcon]

Nice.  Also, like me, you're getting good quality adverts, for technical items, (and I'm also getting car adverts.)  No more of the "Date Russian Ladies" that Google Ads used to serve up whenever the word 'Russian' came up in a forum discussion.  I actually gave Google feedback on those -- yeah, I may read a Russian scientific paper, that doesn't mean I want to buy a Russian woman.  And yes, I do know, those webpages don't actually sell women, they just claim to, and then rip you off.  Still, the very concept makes me angry.

[Arkcon]

The revenue the AI is generating is frighteningly small. I'm glad we're only going to run this experiment for a day.

I'd heard people complain about that.  What is Google's game?  What is the point?  Anyone know.

[Mitch]

In the end, Google's AI made 10% what our normal ad placement would make. So, that's a no go.

[Arkcon]

Sad result.  It would be nice if Google technology could work out something that worked for vendors and content hosts.  I wanna say, these were good ads -- nothing that I felt I absolutely had to block.

[Borek]

In the end, Google's AI made 10% what our normal ad placement would make. So, that's a no go.

Apparently this AI has a lot to learn yet