Other webmasters have previously reported the appearance of the Google Checkout shopping cart icon in Adsense ads, but today (as far as I know) is the first time this icon appeared in Google Adsense ads here in Pinoy Money Talk. If you see this icon, try hovering your cursor over it and you will see the text “This site accepts Google Checkout.”
Seems like Google is aggressively marketing Checkout via Adsense. Checkout, if you do not know yet, is Google’s answer to PayPal. It is an online payment processing service but, unlike PayPal, Google Checkout processes payments without storing value and cannot be used to make payments from person to person.
Check out below a screenshot of the Google Checkout icon in Adsense ads in Pinoy Money Talk.
The Checkout icon is the recent addition to Google’s experimentation in Adsense ads, that includes removing the “Ads by Google” line in the ad unit, mixing Ad Links and contextual ads in the same ad unit, and showing the “G” logo to appear as “Ads by G” rather than the text “Ads by Google”, just like the screenshot below.
