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Is HindustanTimes.com violating Google Adsense TOS ?

Monday, 09 April 2007 00:56 Hiren Pathak

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If you have looked HindustanTimes website recently you would notice that they have done a great job. If you look closely to Hindustan Times and then Take a look at NewYorkTimes (www.nytimes.com) you would notice some similarities.

The 5 column layout, design and especially the font seem to be very,very similar to NYT. I have captured a screen shot of New York Times and Hindustan Times. You would see that below.

Makeover of the website is definately a good news but what stuck me was the performance of the website. The site is now slow. Even with Cable internet speed, the page scrolling is slow.

So I tried to find out the site loading time using one of the website (Website Optimization) that I normally use to check my website performance. And the results were amazing. I checked both NYTimes and HindustanTimes.

The page takes 22.43 seconds to load in T1 line and 118.82 seconds for 56Kbps Speed (which is the speed for most of the indian surfers). Who would wait for 2 minutes to load the page ?

But thats not the moto of my article here. I am not a critic and dont want to talk about site design and stuff here.

^ Hindustan Times

^ New York Times

So the reason behind this article was to talk about Google Adsense usage on HindustanTimes webpages.

Look at the left most column, you would see 4 adlink units. Check out the size of the fonts and the colors. I can understand the color part but does google allow to change the font size of the links ??

So I kept surfing the inner pages and found out the same behaviour. Font sizes of the ads are now matching with their website font schema.

Would google allow that ? I read the google adsense program policies. You can use at most 1 ad link unit along with atmost 3 ad units on one page. You can not chage the code/style of the ad units.

Is google having different TOS for big publishers ?

So am I missing something here ? Is HindustanTimes violating google adsense TOS ??

Written By: Hiren Pathak. You can contact him at informationmadness AT gmail DOT COM
Our valuable member Hiren Pathak has been with us since Tuesday, 12 December 2006.