Jen has a great write up about a woman who was banned from Adsense for clicking on her own ads, loses account, then sues Google.
Her excuse ? – She wanted to to verify that the advertisers were not selling products competing against the ones advertised on her site.
You can read the whole article over at Jensense here
I gotta say that while I do not condone it… I can see why you would want to do it. Many people do not use the correct display url of the actual website that it goes to so really the only way you would know is by clicking. My father who runs whereifish.com was banned for clicking on his own ads.. When I asked him why he clicked on his own ads he told me it was because he wanted to buy what was being offered in the ads. Keep in mind my father didn’t even know what the adsense was and he had never even logged into his AdSense account. I had run it for him.
Also on Jensense’s site she has the entire lowdown on the new MSN Adcenter news scooping everyone once again.
Can you say stunts, no comments from Yahoo last month….250k laughable….fire designer….sell more jogging bras and eat more brainberries……shoe expose this in the way you only can my brother.
…straying way offtopic…
whereifish looks cool shoe – did you inherit the outdoorsman spirit?
My father was a big fisherman as well, and I still love to do what I call “poser fishing” – deep sea charter fishing where you get all the fun and non of the work (and generally a bunch of nice filets).
I actually am not so much a fan of the outdoors but I do like to get out with my dad occasionally
Parents, Eh? Whatch gonna do with them?
Maybe you should have told him more about adsense.
Doesn’t he read you blog? 😛
Todd can’t you see the pictures on this site? Of course he is not an outdoorsman, he is whiter than #FFFFFF.
They should use the adsense preview tool to click or just type the url in the status bar to check the websites.
I am sure Google’s TOS has this covered.
This seems like a far fetched idea since there was a clear terms of service that was agreed upon. However, this does bring up a very valid point. Some website owners are going to be sensitive about their content and how family friendly it may be. Some ads may be a little more edgy than the webmaster wishes to have on their site, etc.
A possible solution would be to have some sort of system that demilitarizes your ads while you are on the system, and perhaps leaves a cookie to keep it like that on the particular computer. Then the ads could have a notch or something in the corner to signify that they are safe to click and are basically sample ads.
Probably too complex to actually get implemented, but I personally think it would be a cool idea. It would also encourage a stronger relationship with the webmasters and the advertisers on the sites. Which adsense is all about avoiding 😉
Brainberries are good….can you say filters…shoe look at the bs image from original story
Wow, i would not have guessed that they would react this way. I can understand that sometimes ppl want to know who advertises on their sites. Of course they should not get money for doing this but beeing banned for a few clicks ?
I hope Google counter sues and shows the world a new scammer is just like an old scammer… nothing new about any of them.
I’ve actually clicked on my own ads so many times that I’ve had to install the this greasemonkey script on firefox that physically prevents you from clicking on the ads.
Why do I click so much? Well, it’s hard not to some time when you’re writing about something that interests you so naturally the ads are something that interest you too!
And I’ve accidently clicked on a bit of whitespace on a browser window to bring it to the front before not realising it was part of an ad.
Why am I not banned? I guess it’s because I report each one to adsense support. I guess.
Not too hard to get an accurate url
– mouse over the ads
– *very carefully* right click (I use safari on a mac on a laptop – if I hold down the command key it says ‘display menu’ so I know I have it, then I just hit the trackpad)
– select view frame source from the drop down
– look for the anchor tag.
Theres a fair of crud in there, but the URL is usually discernable.
I think these instructions are cross browser!
cheap phentermine…
news…
Anyone know what ever came of this? It seemed pretty ridiculous, but I am curious..