Google Related Links Experiment. For Real or Just Spam?

If it’s genuine, I’m not sure if i can post this but since there’s no non-disclosure clause, here goes.. I received this email asking me to participate in an AdSense experiment.

Why I suspect it’s SPAM

1. Usually there’s some corporate copyright notice at the footer. You know, like “Copyright 2006. Google is a trademark of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.”
2. There doesn’t seem to be any buzz on this experiment in the blogosphere. Maybe it’s not a big enought to generate buzz?
3. To participate, I just reply to the email. Sounds like spammers getting me to verify my email?

Am I being over paranoid or what?

As the letter is pretty lenghty, click to see full post below.

Dear AdSense Publisher,

We are looking for publishers who are interesting in trying out an AdSense experiment that we hope will increase revenue and increase users’ interest in your site at the same time. The experiment involves showing a small percentage of your users both regular AdSense ads, in addition to a unit we call Google Related Links. Our hypothesis is that by showing this other resource, users will be more likely to look at this ad slot for useful information, and will therefore notice and click on the ads more often.

Impact:

We will run 4 different versions of this experiment, each on 1% of your users, for a total of 4% of your users. The other 96% of users will not be affected.

Experiment details:

- 1% of users will see regular AdSense ads 90% of the time, and Google Related Links 10% of the time.

- 1% of users will see regular AdSense ads 75% of the time, and Google Related Links 25% of the time.

- 1% of users will see regular AdSense ads 50% of the time, and Google Related Links 50% of the time.

- 1% of users will see regular AdSense ads 20% of the time, and Google Related Links 80% of the time.

Colors:

The regular AdSense ads would be displayed exactly as they are now, with the colors that you currently specify. The Google Related Links units will also use the colors that you have specified for your AdSense text ads.

Example:

Again, these will use the colors that you already specify on your site.

Who is eligible:

Any publisher who uses our 180×150, 468×60, 300×250, or 728×90 ad unit.

When:

We are aiming to launch this experiment around December 19th.

What you need to do:

No work needs to be done on your end. You will just need to give an OK for us to run this experiment. Please respond to this email if you’re interested!

Sincerely,

Andrew

The Google AdSense Team

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