Monday, November 10, 2008

Boycott Google Adsense

My rage at Google Adsense continues to grow.

Saturday morning, I signed on to my Google Adsense account to see how many nickels I'd earned up to that point. I don't earn much from this revenue stream, a couple of dollars a day at most, but at the end of the year it was enough to pay for my hosting account for my website.

But... I found out that my account had been disabled. Absolutely no warning. No explanation. I found a form letter "request for reinstatement" or whatever the heck it was called at Google's Help Section, and sent that in, and supposedly it takes 48 hours before they decide if they'll reinstate your account.

But...this just annoys the hell out of me. I don't know what I've done...I don't know what's wrong, and they won't tell me. (Their policy is that they have the right to terminate your account at any time, and don't have to tell you why. Presumably this is to avoid law suits, should you find out that they're doing it because they don't like the content of your website.)

Well, all I've got on my site is science fiction, a tribute to a few actors, and that's it! I recently started a site in which I planned to cover Obama's first four years as President "through the prism of a small business owner who isn't looking forward to "redistribution of wealth"", but surely they wouldn't disable me because of that.

As for click fraud, what the hell's that? Even if I click on my own page's ads, I don't get any money, their system catches it. So if someone *else* clicks on an ad a gazillion times, shouldn't *they* be the ones punished by having their ISP banned, not having my site ruined????

Now, what I just found out today, is the Search box that I had on every page is also no longer functional. Presumably this is because if anyone does a search, there are Google ads on the search page... but if my account is disabled why not just make those ads invisible? Instead, my entire search box just...won't.... work.

So, I'm assuming that the 48-hour thing meant Monday through Friday, so I'll be giving them until Tuesday night to reinstate me.

But even after that, I'm 90% determined to get rid of all their ads from my site. I'll write up some ebooks or other material of my own to sell, and make my own ads for them, and to hell with Adsense!

Hate to lose the searchbox, though, because that was a nice feature...

Nevertheless, I also won't be clicking on anybody else's google ad sense ads... and if you're a friend, you wont either! (The URL that the ad is supposed to direct you to is at the very bottom of the ad. So just type that in to the Address bar and hit enter, and let that take you where you want to go. Save money for tthe advertiser, and takes money away from Adsense. I love it.)

1 comment:

JoeyMo said...

Google adsense has a bad track record.They make a lot of money off ppl that are trying to make money on the internet. They cancel ppls accounts before they reach their minimum payment and google keeps the money that they made off the poor person that they robbed. I thought that being a big name like google that they could be trusted but they are no different than any other scam artists.