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February 3, 2010
Google’s aggressive Adsense purging logic may be the first crack that will break the Adsense program
Ok,
Google made a big sweep a couple months ago and de-activated about 20% of their Adsense publishers. My personal account which I used for this blog was deactivated for “posing a significant risk to the Google Adsense program”. Well guys, that account had been in use for over 6 years and was generating about $30/month in Adsense revenue to me. How big a risk is that to the powers that be? After appeal there was no detailed response, just “we can turn you off for any reason at any time and we don’t have to tell you why. Telling you why might reveal our secrets of how we determined you were a deadbeat in the first place.” Ok, so my $30 a month Adsense account was a threat to national security. The revenue barely covered hosting costs.
So I took my lumps and am going to go without ads and eat the hosting costs. Over at Kashless, we are starting a new project and I set up an Adsense account for that. Same name on the account, different email, different address (the company). After two days and NEVER having deployed Adsense with that account code (site still in development), I receive an email from Google saying that account has been de-activated for posing a “significant risk to the Adsense program”. The only thing I can think of is that the smarty pants at Google have some logic that snoops out people trying to get around an Adsense account de-activation by setting up another account and cuts those people off at the knees. Well that is certainly their right and privilege. But here is a news flash Google: “The new account is for a new business totally unrelated to the old one!” And the account was NEVER deployed on ANY site. I can understand if they had logic which said “oh, on this URL there was an Adsense account that we deactivated and now there is another Adsense account there from a similar guy, so lets deactivate”. But it seems that Google is using an Hammer and their logic is too broad.
All that is going to do is cause start-ups to go to another ad platform. Advertising.com, Burst, Adbrite and the rest should be thanking Google. Actually I am thanking Google because now I will be using a different ad network and maybe someone else will get enough scale to compete with Adsense. Adsense is sewing their own demise.
Posted by Martin at February 3, 2010 11:11 AM
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