Ive been reading posts for a long time, from people in adsense who, say stuff like... "Ive had an adsense account for 6 months or for a year and now finally ive reached my 100$ min and then now got a letter saying im terminated and i never clicked my own ads or did any violations". I cant count how many times ive seens posts like that.. and of course youd see replys from rude people saying.. stuff like... "oh you must have did a violation or clicked your own ads..". When in reality the person was most likely terminated for having low traffic or poor conversions. If this is a new policy or not is debatable i was asked to confirm that i agree to a new terms of agreement 2 days ago before i was able to login to my account.. So they have changed something in their TOS.. But its my personal opinion from all that ive seen in the past year or so that google indeed for a long time has been terminating accounts that have low traffic or poor conversions.. And shame on those who told these poor people they had did someting wrong.
I don't have a problem with such a ToS but it's out of my mind why would they modify it that way? From the other hand AdSense ToS was always like: "If we don't like you for whatever reason, you will get banned without a notice".
If you get banned will your ads stop publishing?? I can't seem to login to my account yet all my ads are still running fine...
I agree that Google is a for profit company and should be able to conduct their business as they see fit (as long as they dont cheat anyone or break laws etc) One thing to think about though - Google gets paid for every click, publishers only get paid once they reach $100 balance. So how much money is tied up in accounts that will probably never reach $100 and therefore will never be paid out? I dont know the number, but I would bet that it is very high.