It looks like Google AdSense is continuing to evolve.   According to the latest reports, it looks like Google has decided to redefine what counts as a click.

It looks like this change will mainly effect those Google AdSense ads where there wasn’t enough inventory to display all of the ads.   Under the old system, if a user clicked anywhere in the square, you would receive credit for the click on your AdSense earnings.  With the new system, it looks like users will have to click directly on the advertisement text in order to get credit for the click.   Here is a visual, courtesy of Google Blogoscoped:

Clickable Google AdSense

So what does this mean?   A good portion of Google AdSense clicks are often accidental clicks, so this will considerably lower the AdSense clicks for many AdSense publishers.   This blog generates about a third of its income from AdSense, so I will be following this closely over the coming months to see if it has any influence on earnings.