Here’s an interesting story from The Register, something I didn’t know before — put simply, if you’re running an advocacy website against any individual, group, or organization, it could get your AdSense account canceled.
In the exclusive story by The Register:
Exclusive: Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web’s most influential anti-Scientology sites.
Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations. This could have something do with the nature of the ads Google was serving. Many of the Google-driven ads funding the anti-Scientology site were paid for by the Church of Scientology.
“While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers,” read Google’s letter to Enturbulation, a kind of home base for the now famous Anonymous movement. “Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.“
And according to the updated terms and policies of Google AdSense, publishers can be banned for “any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill.” Though we haven’t heard of any sites critical of Google getting banned from their ad network, technically, they can legitimately do that if they want to.
Say for example, you put up a blog against your ISP or a certain company and put AdSense ads on the site. All the ISP or the company needs to do is run an AdWords campaign and they can legitimately request Google to ban your account. Is this the end of those &^%$#Sucks.com blog? Not likely.
In essence, if Google is to choose between a feuding AdSense Publisher and an AdWords Advertiser, Google will almost always side on the latter. Show me the money!
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This is bad for bloggers like us. There no more freedom of speech.
Oh well… the behemoths can almost always push the little guy most of the time. Tsk tsk… like you said, show me the money!
Oh well… Google is still a business if you think about it, so yes, in these instance, they will (and should) side with the advertisers.
I sympathize with the website for losing a good revenue instrument such as Adsense. But optimistically speaking, they should realize that there are still other income opportunities for them - like Bidvertiser perhaps?
First PR penalties, now indirect curtailment of the freedom of speech?
What’s happening to Google? tsk tsk tsk
hmmm, “show me the money” reminds me of a cheat code.
What if I post an review article about smart bro and I mentioned in that post that “I`m not satisfied on smart bro’s performance”. Would google terminate my acount since smart is their publisher? This is clearly a direct cover-up for the exposing the truth. Just like what GMA did on ZTE scandal. hehehehe
Sorry, smart is one of their advertisers, rather.
What’s stopping us from having more than one web site, right? That’s why I feel there’s no curtailment of speech.
What I don’t understand is that in Adsense, you can block URLs. If Enturbulation puts the Church of Scientology sites in its “block” list, then the CoS wouldn’t end up paying for ads shown in the Enturbulation site, right?
Wouldn’t that be simpler than totally disabling the Enturbulation account?
Pahabol… what if Malu Fernandez starts using Adwords? Ayayay! :p
If my account was disabled by google adsense and I filled up the appeal form in their help center and submitted it, should I get a response from google if they will re-instate my account or deny my appeal? This is my first appeal. I submitted my appeal on May 13, 2008 and until now (May 16, 2008) I haven’t receive any response or email from google adsense. How long does it usually take for them to review my appeal and give a response? Can I sign-up for Google Adsense with different Mailing Address, different IP Address and different email address with the same payee name and Account Name. Because it’s possible to have two or more different persons with the same name and surname. If I delete my google account completely, will I also delete my google adsense information?