The site in question is used for file sharing. According to adbrite stats they receive about 390,000 uniques and 2,200,000 pageviews daily. This is how they work: When you visit a link to download a file, a page with three ad spots appear, the page reloads every 5 seconds. 2 ad spots load ads from CPM Networks, when no CPM ads are available for your country Google adsense ads start showing. The bottom ad is from adbrite, if you click on "Your ad here" you can see the stats for the site. The site may be violating google guidelines by inflating impressions, and many other guidelines. If you stay enough time on the following page adsense ads will appear. http://www.yousendit.com/invalid.aspx I also posted about how they defraud CPM networks. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=69919
Alarum - you should be careful about stating "the site IS violating" and say "the site MAY be violating". For all you know they could quite easily be a Premium Advertiser (this is probably with that amount of traffic) and no-one here seems to be 100% sure what their TOS is. For example Zorpia.com, with millions of visitors a day, is allowed to show Adsense and yahoo Ads on the same page - something we mere mortals can only dream of.
I found two other filesharing sites with google adsense. note: they do not reload ads. The sites may host illegal downloads. The following page shows their top100 downloads with google adsense between them. http://www.megaupload.com/top100/ According to adbrite it receives 690,000 uniques and 2,900,000 pageviews daily. http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?opid=33980&afsid=1 The second one is allowed to modify adsense ads, so it must receive a lot of traffic. http://rapidshare.de/ http://www.rapidshared.org/index.php?t=category&n=music http://www.rapidshared.org/index.php?t=category&n=software The ads appear when you follow the links to download files. Many people are worry to adhere to adsense guidelines, while this sites have special treatment. Report them and you'll find nothing happens.
Alarum - see my earlier post. Now you have answered the "maybe" as Rapidshare IS a premium advertiser. Premium Advertisiers have a different set of TOS to the majority of us. Consequently there is nothing to report as their strategy is pre-agreed with google
Thanks whitespider, I have followed your advice. The part that stinks is that those sites may be used to host illegal downloads and adsense ads may appear in the same page. I wonder what adsense advertiser might think about that.
If you check the site's code you'll see if they're a premium publisher, or not, because there are usually some 'enhancements', such as keyword-specific targetting and premium publishers seem to have more control over ad appearances. Yeah, it kinda sucks that some sites are doing grey area stuff to make money, but these networks know what they're doing and advertisers will pull out, or at least not allow x site to be targetted if they're not happy.
If you are convinced of this and want to stop illegal file downloads on the internet and can locate the files report the abuse to the site itself. They most likely a policy of removing such files when notified. If that is the case and they do act upon reports of abuse, then they are acting responsibly. If they ignore such reports, then you should contact the companies who own the software and/or music and/or movies that is being made available illegally on that site and let them know about the situation. However, you should not be attacking sites because there is the potential for abuse. It is how they deal with it that matters, not whether or not it can occur.
I've emailed google about this before (not about that particular site though) .. and what it basically comes down to is: Different sites have different rules to follow. If you've got the traffic, then google will make a different set of rules for you.
Sincerely, I don't see the point of doing that (I do have a life). I have just read to many posts about adsense compliance and guidelines, but as you can see they just apply to mere mortals.