I wanted to suggest you check out Adroll, which is a niche vertical ad network that works great in conjunction with Adsense. Full disclosure: I work there, but regardless it’s a great product that users interested in Adsense alternatives should take a look at. We solve a number of problems that small to medium sized publishers face in an intuitive and highly transparent system. I hope you’ll check us out, and let me know if you have any questions about the service.

I knew about this new ad option already but when I got this post delivered to my e-mail from you, I decided to actually do something.

I checked out the new ads last week and planned to come back and try them out but got busy and backburnered it. Your post inspired me to take some time to add some of this advertising to all my blogs. The ads look great on several of my blogs and I’ve even decided to use ones targeting webmasters on my business site since I won’t put Adsense on my own site (so I don’t send potential customers to competitors).

Cheers,
Dana

Thanks for the tip! Looks like you can indeed change the colors on the tabbed ads. In the tool where you build the tabbed ads, on step 2 (“Appearance”) there’s a pulldown called “Predefined Color Layouts” that lets you pick a color.

Elle Fromelle