Google AdSense not good for Advocacy Sites?

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!