Marcelo Calbucci

    There are a lot of sites on the Internet running Google Adsense, you know, the Google Ads that appear on sites that are not from Google.

    Google always has a message on those ads saying "Ads by Google".  If you go to my previous blog post (When a user misspell his email address) on the top Google Ad you'll see "Ads by Gooooooogle".

    Today I went to LinkedIn and I was looking for somebody when I saw an ad for Google's GMail. The first thing I noticed was the ad was a video. Never seen that before. Then I realized it was an Ad for GMail (it was not clear).

     This is a screenshot of a regular Text Ad on LinkedIn:

    Notice that it clear starts with "Ads by Google".

    Here is another Ad from Google, but this time an Image:

    Not as clear as before, but the "Ads by Google" disclaimer is there at the bottom (it would be better to be consistent at the top of the ad)

    Finally, here is a Google video ad for GMail:

    Nope, it doesn't say it is an Ad.

    When I worked on MSN Search, there was an FCC probe into search engines and their paid-links (a.k.a. sponsored links) practices in the sense of not misleading users into clicking on ads without them knowing it was ads.

    Afraid of some FCC regulation, the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL) decided to clearly label the Ads links. Most of them already did that, but reinforcing it helped the FCC leave us alone.

    Now, Google sometimes does things that either are evil or stupid. Since they claim to "do no evil", this is an obvious case of a stupid decision on not disclaiming on their on Google Adsense program that this video is an ad.

    What you think?