Have You Heard The Latest?

I love the Google Adsense Team so much, I decided to dedicate my latest podcast to them.

You can hear what was on my mind at the time in the latest episode of Test Pattern. You can subscribe at ISPN Media, or you can click the ODEO player link below.

Click below for the transcript…

Google Adsense.

Some people make a lot of money from running google ads on their blogs. I am not one of them. In fact, in just under two years of running google adsense ads on all of my web sites, I made a whopping $141 dollars. That's a measely 19.6 cents per day. Just for the record, if you pay just $10 per month for web hosting, it costs 33.1/3 cents per day. So, it's safe to say I was never going to "get rich" off of them, that's for sure.

This week, I received an email from the google adsense team telling me that my account was in violation of their terms and conditions. They said my site had received invalid clicks or impressions from users of a third-party program that provides incentives to visit my site. They said the program may include, but was not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.

I immediately responded with a query asking what service it was, so I could put a stop to it. I definitely didn't want to be in violation of their terms and conditions, that's for sure. How could I live without that 19 cents per day? They responded quickly, but never answered my question. Instead they informed me that they had re-reviewed my site, and I was indeed in violation. Yet they still did not tell me with any detail, HOW, or WHY I was in violation.

By this point I had checked all of my websites, myself. I checked all of the logs. I had seen no unusual increase in traffic, and there was nothing suspicious in any of the log files. Even my Google Adsense account page showed just 37 clicks for the entire month of November, and just 5 in the past two days. Then it hit me. I am a member of Blog Explosion. That had to be it. When you join Blog Explosion, you surf other member sites, and in turn, people visit your site. There is no monetary gain from these vists, they are designed solely to help build visitors, and eventually, return visitors to your site. I have been a member of Blog Explosion much longer than I have been running google ads on any of my sites, Surely they haven't decided to "crack down" on people using this valuable service have they? Blog Explosion visitors are required to stay at a site for 30 seconds before clicking on to the next site, I can't see any of them taking time out of their surfing to click a google ad, but then again, I also thought Google adsense would respond to my inquiry a bit more professionally too, so I guess anything can happen. It simply had to be Blog Explosion, that's the only explanation for it, at least where my site is concerned.

I decided to send one more email to the Google Adsense Team, asking for more clarification, and decided if they could not answer me, I would cancel my google adsense account outright. I might as well. If I am going to be in constant violation of their terms and conditions, it makes no sense to keep running their ads on any of my sites.

When they responded, they did so simply with instructions on how to cancel my account, and failed once again to enlighten me as to exactly how my site was found in violation of their terms and conditions.

It really doesn't shock me though, seeing that my site was denied membership in July of 2004 for "advocated against individuals, groups, or organizations". When I first applied they must have had issues with people who speak out when something is wrong, and call for boycotts of organizations that do stupid things. They obviously changed their attitude by November of that year, because I didn't change a thing on my site, and was quickly accepted into the fold of google adsense publishers.

Now they themselves have become one of those organizations that simply does stupid things and thinks they can do no wrong.