Well, Kyle was doing a little websurfing this morning and stumbled upon an interesting article by Robin Good. The article profiles a large list of AdSense Alternatives and although Robin forgot to include adgridwork in the list, the most interesting aspect of the story reads:

Adsense lifts ban on Adsense alternatives

Where before it was impossible to run Adsense alternatives alongside Adsense advertising, there has been a recent change of heart on the part of Google. It is now possible to do so, as Jennifer Slegg of JenSense notes. Jennifer quotes Google executive Brian Axe, who writes that:

”When it comes to enforcing policies on third-party contextual ads, we’ll be following the updated program policies instead of the T&Cs on this point. That is to say, publishers may now display other contextual ads on the same site or page as Google ads as long as they don’t have the same look and feel as our ads”

Thus it turns out that adgridwork is compatible with AdSense by default since our ads are distinguishable from theirs in several ways (the fonts, borders, number of characters permitted, etc). So effective immediately, we will turn on contextual advertising for all sites on the network to ensure that more targeted traffic finds its way to all of our sites. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns regarding this issue. Thanks.

Nick & Kyle

Some of you may have noticed Google released new Terms of Service for their ad service which can be summed up with the following quote:

‘In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or
services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site,
it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.’

Essentially, you are no longer allowed to use any other ad service that resembles Google’s ads, not just other contextually-targeted ads.
Also, they cannot be anywhere on the same site, not just on the same page. So no more 50/50 split of multiple ad services or anything
like that. There is no word from Google on adgridwork specifically, however, after reviewing the terms and reading some articles detailing the changes,
we believe adgridwork ads are safe to use in conjunction with Google’s ads. Our ads have a border around them, while Google’s do not, and this appears
to be enough of a distinction to prevent “confusion” between the services per Google’s ToS. However, if you are still concerned, remember we do allow
you to change all the colors associated with the ads shown on your page. You can easily change the styling of your ad block to a slightly different
color scheme - this would certainly fall within the new ToS. We hope Google’s changes will not prevent any of our users from using our service -
we have tried to make it easy for our users to use our service with any other advertisement services available. If there are any questions,
do not hesitate to contact us.

Nick and Kyle

Alright everybody, lots of upgrades to announce, including some big enhancements (we believe, anyway) that a lot of users had been requesting. We haven’t posted to the news in a few days, but we have been working hard nonetheless. Some of these upgrades have even been out since yesterday; we just waited to put everything into one big news post. It’s really late now, and I’ve been up for nearly 24 hours, so if there are any problems with the new features, make sure to email them to us. I’ve been testing for the last 2 hours, but you never know :-). So, without further ado, here’s the full rundown of the changes:

• New Ad Block Sizes!: That’s right, we finally got around to adding different size blocks. We’ve had many requests for lots of different sizes; we now have most of Google’s standard block sizes, though we do not have any blocks with widths less than 160 px as we had to shrink the ads to a basically unreadable font and we did not want to add any further limitations on the size of the ad text. The full list of new sizes is as follows: 728×90, 468×60, 234×60, 160×600, 300×250, 336×280, 250×250, and 180×150. If anybody needs a size that we still do not offer, email us and we’ll see if we can add it to our selection.
• Adult Content: OK, now before anybody gets offended and emails us, the adult content has its own network. That’s right, we have added an adult content network; now when you create a new site, you can mark it as an adult-content site, and you will get a different list of categories to select from. When you add an adult-content site, your ad will only be shown on other adult-content sites, and your site will only show other adult-content ads. We decided to bypass any type of per-site or per-user allowance of adult sites and instead create a whole separate network. This way, those of you that want nothing to do with adult-content can use adgridwork the way you have been without thinking twice. Some people might wish we had stayed out of the adult market, but this move was done in large part to protect our users. We found some adult sites that placed ads in the network, even though that was against our Terms of Service. We removed the ones we found (thank you to those users that calmly and respectfully pointed out some inappropriate ads out there), but as the network grows we know we won’t be able to keep track of all the sites. Hence we now have a separate adult network. If any users find adult ads displayed in the general network (either because they got on the network before we added the new categories or they’re simply being jerks and ignoring the adult network) please email us and we will move them immediately.
• Google AdSense: We’ve had more than a few users want to know if our ads can be displayed on pages with AdSense ads. Until yesterday, the answer was no they cannot since Google prevents you from displaying any other targeted ads on a page with AdSense (if it was up to us, we wouldn’t care :-). We understand many of you are probably already running AdSense, and might not feel comfortable replacing your Google ads just quite yet with our smaller (but growing!) network. To accommodate, when adding a site we now allow you to mark it as an AdSense site, and instead of showing targeted ads on your site, completely random ads from our network (general or adult, whichever group your site is in, not both). This allows you to run both AdSense and adgridwork without violating Google’s ToS on the same page.
• Smaller updates: We added some categories per user requests, including Web Services: Proxy Sites, Web Services: Tutorials, Health and Beauty: Addictions, and Art/Photo/Music: Sewing. We also now have a special category request link on the add/update site page. If you don’t see a category that fits your site, just click the link, type your suggestion, and we’ll have your suggestion immediately. Finally, not sure if anybody besides us noticed this, but occasionally the ad block would load without display ads. There was a logic problem in our ad display code which has now been fixed, so the blocks should load correctly every time now (barring unforeseen major traffic congestion; our database is getting a huge number of hits every day).

Those are all the upgrades for now, if there’s other things people want to see, please email us. The only reason we run this site is to provide a service to our users, so we love hearing all of your feature suggestions. We will keep working on updates, including possibly a forum and an improved ranking system, so until next time, thank you for using adgridwork and we hope the recent changes make our service a better fit for our users.