Google AdSense Displays New Interactive Ad Type: Better or Worse?

Google AdSense Ad

Google AdSense is showing a very interesting and highly interactive new ad type on our site. For example, the ad shown on the left is from one of our pages (click on the image to view it) where it shows popular hobbies in India along with a Google search box which is presumably usable.Wait, there is more.

Each of the popular hobbies it shows like “How to create a website” or “How to make chocolate” are independently clickable and will presumably lead to different web pages (again could not click on it because of AdSense TOS). At least 9 different clickable URL’s are in this single ad along with a usable search box.

I can see such ads being used by ecommerce site to provide direct links to popular products or categories. Is this generally available through AdWords or restricted to Google’s ads only. What concerns me is the whether these are site targeted and the payout associated with these ads. The ad is definitely not very relevant to context and hence I am suspecting low payout.

Google AdSense made some recent changes which seemed to have affected many websites including ours. Not only is the eCPM rate low but also the context targeting is way off. I don’t like the idea of being made guinea pigs.

IMHO Google AdSense team should add more QA people and not use publishers as test subjects.