With Google Adsense business practices as an example, it’s no wonder the 1% get richer and the 99% get poorer.

I’ve been using Google Adsense since I started blogging on my four blogs over two years ago. Although I don’t make a personal income from the advertising revenue, it’s been enough to cover the costs of running my blogs.

That has started to change, however. I noticed that recently Google has changed the design of their link ads so a large arrow in a gray box appears to the right of each link. I was curious so I clicked on the arrow on another site’s ad and discovered that it goes right through to the website with no provision for us who provide ad space to make revenue.

So, out of a total ad area, I estimate that only about 20% of it is linked so we actually make revenue on the clicks. The big arrow and the url under the main heading are linked directly to the company without us making any revenue and Google gets their ad placement with us absolutely free.

This is not fair. If we generate clicks on our sites, we should get the fair revenue without the deceptive redirection of clicks to avoid paying us.

On the left you can see a link ad box as it appears. To the right I have placed the same ad with colored boxes added around each element to illustrate just how little of the ad links through our account to produce revenue to the host site for running the ad.

The key for this ad box with the hilites I added is:

Green boxes are the links giving credit and revenue to the hosting site owner. The red boxed areas do not link to us and we do not receive revenue if clicked in these areas. The remainder of the ad area that is not hilited in any way is ‘link neutral’, not linking through to anywhere and not providing revenue to anyone, including Google Adsense.