AdSense Account Suspended

We've all seen the get rich schemes and advertizements. You see these in your email and on cable and all over the web. After dealing with AdSense on my blog I can say that you won't get rich if you are a small publisher.

I have a blog and spend some time writing articles for it. I had seen the advertizements for ads and seen ads on other websites so I decided to put some advertizements on my blog. Mainly I did this as a rationalization so that when I spent time on my blog I could always rationalize that I was making a little bit of money off of it. I didn't have any expectations of getting rich, just making a little like, maybe 50 cents a day.

I went to all the trouble of setting up an AdSense account and running through the tutorials to put the code in my blog template. Then with the ads running I would check on my AdSense account and see the money adding up. I have to mention that one of the unusual things that AdSense does is that they have a $100 limit. In other words, until you get $100 in your AdSense account you don't get paid. I had wondered at the time why the ceiling was so high. Afterall, AdSense is supposedly paid through PayPal which requires very little effort on their part as opposed to sending a paper check in the mail. A more reasonable schedule would seem to be payment once a month for any month that you have at least $10. It now appears that this $100 limit is by design and probably to put off paying as long as possible. As long as you see your account increasing you think you are making money but until they actually pay you, the money is just an illusion and has cost them nothing.

So, my money was building up and then I got an email telling me that my AdSense account had been suspended because of invalid clicks. Now, I know that I have never clicked on the ads on my blog to try to get more money from AdSense. Also, no one that I know personally even knows that I have a blog. There is also no way for anyone to know that the blog is mine because I use a pseudonym. Nor do I use any type of traffic producing links. I suppose someone whom I don't know could have been clicking excessively but that would have nothing to do with me. I have no way to control who comes to my blog or what they do there. The problem is that this is giving the benefit of the doubt to AdSense while at the same time they are openly accusing me of trying to cheat them. I can honestly say that I have never tried nor have any knowledge of anyone else trying to generate more ad revenue on my blog by clicking ads.

I spent a lot of time searching the web and checking forums. And, apparently, this happens a lot. In fact, I have yet to find a small publisher who actually made it up to $100 and got paid. On the other hand, I've heard of a lot of people who curiously got the exact same generic email message saying that their accounts had been suspended. AdSense does include a form that supposedly allows you to appeal however from what I've heard the only result of this appeal is that they either ignore it or send you a second generic email saying that your appeal is denied. When I originally wrote this piece I hadn't heard a thing from Adsense. This has been repeated over and over again at forums across the web and has even been confirmed on AdSense's own Help Group forum.

When I wrote this article I was pretty disgusted with Adsense because they had pulled my account which contained $34 for apparently no reason. I talked a lot about fraud in the original version. However, before this article was published I heard back from Adsense and they reinstated my account. So, I guess I can't accuse them of fraud. This is what I discovered. The checking software that Adsense uses is pretty hamfisted. It will react to one person clicking a lot of ads as well as people who intentionally try to increase clicks. The software always disables the account. Then you have to submit the appeal and wait for a real person to review it. In my case it took 10 days for Adsense to reinstate my account. They include suggestions about informing them of suspicious activity. I'm not quite sure how I would do that since they own the servers that my blog is on. I can get some information with a counter and Google Analytics but nothing that would tell me who did the clicks. So, basically, their suggestion about reporting suspicious activity is meaningless.

Secondly, I tried BidVertizer during the time that my Adsense account was down. In fact, I had removed the Adsense code from my blog and had to put it all back in when Adsense was turned back on. All I can say is that if Adsense is slow on money then BidVertizer has them beat by a factor of 10. I only accumulated 36 cents whereas I would have gotten about $3 from Adsense during the same time. This was in spite of the fact that I manually edited out a lot of the less desirable ads from BidVertizer. Adsense does seem to do a better job with targeted ads. And, Adsense did put back all of the original money that I had in my account before it was pulled. I do with though that Adsense's ceiling of $100 were lower. However, compared to BidVertizer, Adsense is the clear winner. I guess I can't say 100% that Adsense is legitmate since I haven't gotten any money from them yet. However, I am expecting that I will be paid when my account reaches $100. And, considering how little it takes to set off the automated checking software I would say that publishers would do well to ignore any adds that claim to increase clicks by any phenomenal amount. Traffic generating links will be caught and will be counted as cheating. However, if your account is suspended and you've done nothing wrong, just fill out the appeal and your account should be reinstated. I'm not getting rich but maybe I do feel less guilty about spending time on my blog.