Variable Number of Ads in Ad Units
JenSense reports that AdSense has an updated to their system that will vary the number of ads in an ad unit:
To increase monetization on your site and improve the relevance of ads, AdSense now varies the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. In cases where we determine that increasing the size of the most relevant ads will improve performance, we’ll drop the lowest-performing ad or ads and expand the remaining ones to fill the entire unit. Showing fewer ads works to your advantage, allowing the better-performing ads to draw more user attention and click-throughs. Google AdSense technology will automatically determine the optimal number of ads to display on any page and will only show fewer ads when doing so will make you more money!
This is from the AdSense support pages.
Google needs to get an AdSense blog to report these types of things!
Paul Wells Said,
August 14, 2005 @ 1:35 pm
Though I suppose the question is whether it’s better to have a few high paying ads rather than a lot of lower paying ones.
Toivo Lainevool Said,
August 15, 2005 @ 7:51 am
Right, Paul. I think Google’s algorithm’s are smart enough to figure out what will bring in the most revenue. I generally trust them to do the right thing in cases like this. Although it would be nice to be able to control this as an option if you had images above your ads or something.