Okay, this is a very informative section. Thank you all for the input. I need to ramble a sec and any input you can give would be greatly appreciated. I want to try to learn from your experiences if I can. I started with Google AdSense and they swear up and down I was clicking my own ads, which I was not. I had I think, $170.00 in the account and had not been paid. I spent about about $100 on some sort of place called handytraffic.com to drive traffic to the site, had 360 users on the site, and sent out about 20 million emails and 20k press releases and did 2 radio interviews in 3 weeks. We had (our first 3 weeks mind you) 1.7 million pageviews on our site. So, they cancelled my account, banned the account, and refused the 3 appeals. Needless to say, I was angry. So, now I need a new place. I applied to yahoo, but it says they are in beta and no response yet. I have read about Bidvertiser and Clicksor and Adbright. I need help deciding which is going to be the best move. I really am not worried about the money right now as I have bigger fish to fry and $170 is not a huge deal to me. Later, when we get larger, we can do other thigs to raise money.. but for now, I would be happy with $5 bucks a month and plenty of ads to fill the pages from a company that is not going to dump us like that again. Advise? Thanks guys.
Your case is similar to some other webmasters. Please note that Google observes a website's behavior and any shocking high click through rate, even if quite naturally but happening overnight or in a rather very short period of time, makes them think the webmaster has done something suspicous.
Thanks guys. I will read that link. I appreciate the help. We went ahead and added Clicksor and mixed in another ad company so we have a fallback in case this happens again.
Also, you mention "we." If you're doing this as some sort of partnership with other people, you can form a legal entity and that entity can legitimately get an Adsense account.
Well, I mentioned "we" as a C-Corp. I believe I signed up as the C-Corp. Hell, I barely had the account long enough to even see it. I am assuming they shut us down because either we were competing with youtube or we got 1.7 million hits from Oct 12th to Oct 31st. I do not see how the heck that can be a bad thing. Either way, we created an account with Clicksor, but it is lagging my site a lot so I am looking for an alternative now. Thanks for the input.