October 31st, 2006: Happy Halloween & AdSense NonSense

Howdy, all! A very Happy Halloween to all of you out there in CyberSpace! Here's a lump of sticky candy from me to you!

* toss! *

Woops. Sorry about that. Nothing worse than candy stuck in yer hair...

Anyway. As you may have noticed, Episode 28 is drawing to a close. Still a couple more surprises on their way, so don't tune out just yet!

Meanwhile, some of you may remember that a couple months ago, Google ads started popping up on the Pirate Cove website. I had enrolled in a program called "Google AdSense" which, in addition to tracking the number of visitors Pirate Cove was receiving, provided me with about a buck a day in revenue. Not exactly an ad program destined to allow me to retire... but I didn't mind. I was more interested in watching the daily hits graph, etc.

Well, after about 2 months, Google owed me a little over $50 in revenue. They said they were going to send me a check and to please confirm my phone number. Next day, they shut down the ads, told me I was in default of their policies, and to kiss the check goodbye.

WTF?

I wrote them for details and their reply was: there were unauthorized clicks on the ads. I wrote again, asking them to explain what that meant. They said that it is against their policy for me to tell people to click the ad links and that it is also against their policy to use an automatic link clicker (or something like that.)

Once again, I replied to inform them that, yes, I told people to USE the links if they saw something interesting but I wasn't using an automatic link clicker... heck, I wouldn't have any idea of where to FIND such a thing, much less the ability to set one up! I wanted proof. I wanted details. And I asked them for it. Well, they refused. The links had invalid clicks, their word was law and too bad for me.

Guess they needed the $50 to fund their purchase of YouTube.

Again I wrote, this time asking them "so what you're saying is, if I went to someone's website, saw they had Google Ads, and started clicking them at random, you'd shut down their account? That hardly seems fair to the website owner."

No reply.

So I sent them one last e-mail, requesting the name of Google's attorney because I would like to discuss the situation with them. After all, in a legal case, the with-holding of information is against the law.

They never replied.

It would be kinda stupid for me to ask y'all to stop using Google as a way of protesting their less than professional attitude, but I thought I'd mention my situation anyway. It's been a couple weeks since the incident and I wanted time to cool down before posting anything about it here.

So just remember: if you're ever on a website and you see "Ads by Google," whatever you do, DON'T CLICK THEM! You might be screwing over whoever owns the website! After all, those links aren't there to be clicked! Pretend they don't exist! 'Cause if you click too much, who knows? Perhaps the Google Police will come to get you!

Ooooooo! Scary!

Viva Las Vegas!

- J!