Google debuts AdSense “Auto Ads” for publishers

http://adage.com/article/digital/google-debuts-adsense-auto-ads-publishers/312476/

Google has taken another step toward bringing artificial intelligence to its ad platforms. The company has long used AI to serve ads that its algorithms calculate will perform particularly well on a given publisher’s website given the content and audience. Beginning today, Google is offering web publishers an optional update that will use machine learning not just to choose the best ads to display, but also the best places on the website to put them. That includes areas where there were not ads placed before. Auto-ads will even work around existing, manually placed ads so that they don’t need to be removed or changed. As Google said in their blog post announcing the update, “Place on piece of code just once to all of your pages and let Google take care of the rest.” This one piece of code will find unused potential ad space where new ads can be placed, and optimize the placement of ads while tracking “ad density” to ensure that auto-advertising on a page doesn’t get out of hand.

As a publisher, I would love the auto ads feature (assuming it works as described). Google is harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to take tedious ad-optimization work away from publishers. This lets them focus on developing great content to bring in readers who will see the auto-optimized ads. Not only does this take work away from the publishers, but it’s highly likely that Google’s algorithms will ultimately find better performing ad placements than a person could do manually. The key risk that I see is the artificial intelligence’s potential lack of design aesthetic. It is possible that Auto Ads will create ads in places that will draw a lot of attention, but might not look natural (or could look just plain bad) within the website. This, of course, would be an issue that could easily be remedied with future tweaks to the Auto Ad design.