It’s a common practice for online services to offer two kinds of licenses: free & premium. The free licenses usually imply including a linking watermark on the widget or file the user is getting – be it a video, a banner, a poll, a photo gallery, you name it. The premium licenses include different extra features, among which one of the most important is getting rid of the linking watermark.

Google AdWords employees don’t think so. They think adding a watermark on your banner ads is OK. Here’s the result:

They’ve got a link to their page and a marketing message on your banner ad! An ad for Google AdWords in the space where your ad was supposed to be! You might as well think that AdWords is a free service, but it isn’t.

What if SnackTools would have a similar policy? What would happen if BannerSnack stuck its watermark – or “user bar” as Google like to call it – on your banners, no matter if you pay or not for the service? Here’s what the ad above would look like:

B-E-A-utiful! Your banner advertising campaign will certainly be a GREAT SUCCESS! Sure, they might say that the black bar contains a link to your website, but the banner already links to your website!

More seriously, this is not even by far the biggest problem AdWords has. Their biggest problem is their stubbornness as they still refuse to accept ActionScript 3 flash banners (4 years passed since the standard was introduced). As you probably know, the banners you create with BannerSnack are all ActionScript 3, thus the compatibility problems with AdWords.

We hope 2010 will bring us some good news from Google. Not for us, but for you, our community, so you can work with AdWords, which otherwise is a very handy and cost-effective service.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 8:51 am and is filed under News & Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.