Hello-

Since Adsense is pushing toward auto-ad placement, I thought it might be interesting to brainstorm about it, and see if there are ways to take advantage of it.

Personally I would be curious to know, how they do, (as well as other services of this kind) to know where to inject the code. I know, it can only be speculations, but, may be, by observing the results, we can guess the method.

Is the parsing of the HTML/CSS achieved server side? Or on the client side?

In all events, the page needs to be rendered to find out, where ads can be placed. This is time and resources consuming, and since a page layout can be changed anytime, this is something which needs to be achieved for each request.

So, I guess this is done client side, once the page is loaded and rendered, a piece of javascript is parsing the DOM hierarchy, to find all elements of the page, their positions, and guess where ads can be inserted?

May be there are ways to help / give hints to the parser? I mean, for example, using particular class / id names, or things that the parse might be looking for.

Indirectly related, did you ever observe auto-ad placements which were messing the page layout? I don't mean hurting the UX, but really breaking the page layout?

How do auto-ads work with infinite scroll pages?

Questions like that :)