Wow, TOS violation (funny how enthusiastic he is though)

Why risking being forever banned from AdSense, just to earn some bucks for a couple of days?

 

I just checked the main page of this site and the google ads have been replaced with another. They must have gotten the dreaded mail.

 

Silly kids and their get rich quick schemes.

 

he deserved it, that's for sure.

 

The original message referrred to here is down, but the second message in the forum inviting clicks was still up when I visited.

I am an AdWords advertiser as well as an AdSense publisher. Such activity is irritating from both perspectives -- because it robs us, as advertisers, of our budegt, and potentially encourages Google and other ad brokers to lower our payment rates to make fraud less profitable.

 

So on the day of this post I sent the owner of the site a pretty nasty email. Today he replied with this email:

"Hi,
Thank you for telling us about this. We did not know what we did was in
violation of the TOS for adsense. We have never done well with it and
wanted to give them a try. So, we thought we'd try asking our members to
support our sponsors and created a contest for it. I did hear a few of our
members actually found the links helpful and are going to use the
advertisers service for self - publishing. In the end it was very good for
our sponsors and our members, just not for us. Even with our incentives to
click we did very poorly with it and at our peak only made us three dollars
a day and that was just for a few days. Our norm was less than a buck a day.
So, we will not be using adsense any longer. It just does not perform on a
site like ours. We do much better with conventional banner advertising. I
have heard that many other sites do make alot of money with Google, just not
us. We did return the little money we made back to Google.

I removed the thread when I found it was in violation of my agreement with
Google. Our intention was never to cheat anyone. Luckily, we only made a
few dollars for the month, which I returned to google. So, no damage has
been done.

The tactics you and your buddies use, feel like being attacked by a 'lynch
mob'. I know your intentions are good, nobody likes people who cheat and
steal, but you guys could have been alot kinder and still reached the same
conclusion with us.

Thanks again for you time and efforts.

Albert"


I just replied and basiclly said if his common sense didnt tell him it was wrong then I dunno what to say.
=\

 

I agree. Common sense should have told them this was not cool. Regardless, ignorance of the law (or TOS) is no excuse.

 

Hmm I join a program -- Do I read the TOS? HELL YES. They had to have known what they were doing was wrong. I do like the part about

I suppose that commiting fraud is ok and that people should just ignore it. Very sad.