Reader oyiabrown asks:
Any chance you could expand on what are the grave limitations of AdSense by Google (mentioned above) – to a raw WordPress beginner, when you have a moment?
I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me about this and now that this reader has, I’m happy to explain how Google AdSense works.
AdSense is a program that places ads on your blog and then gives you money whenever anybody clicks on them. It might work quite well for smaller blogs with very modest readerships. You might get your $30 every 6 months or so and have no major issues.
However, when a blog’s popularity grows and it starts making more money for the blogger, problems begin. AdSense uses every opportunity to shut down your account and keep the money you have accumulated in it. As soon as your AdSense account gets a few hundred dollars in it, be prepared for the AdSense to manufacture some pretext to close the account and keep the money.
What can those pretexts be? Well, anything that can be qualified as “suspicious clicking activity” (this is an official term used by AdSense). If the company decides that a certain reader has clicked too often or too much, this is grounds for termination. If you clicked on an ad on your own blog just once either from curiosity, to see how it works, or simply by mistake, your account will be terminated and you will never be able to start a new one even if you open a completely different blog 3 years later.
Also, if your blog is popular, it might start attracting trolls. A troll can maliciously get your account terminated by clicking on ads many times in rapid succession.
In many cases, accounts get terminated and AdSense keeps all the money in them for no discernible reason whatsoever. I’ve read dozens of complaints about it on the Blogger discussion forum, and the main problem is that there is no appealing such decisions. The account gets closed and there is nothing you can do.
P.S. I don’t use AdSense and the annoying ad that started appearing after the first post on the Home Page is something that I have neither requested nor have any control over. This is something that WordPress is doing to generate revenues for itself. I think it’s fair, albeit annoying to me, because the folks at WordPress provide really fantastic support to their bloggers.
Clarissa's Blog 
Hm that is interesting. My boyfriend has AdSense through youtube and I was clicking on his ads every day, but they hadn’t said anything to him or me. I have thought about doing it through my blog, but it was my understanding that you had to have the VIP membership.
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Maybe they are waiting for him to accumulate enough money in his account to close it down and keep the money.
If your blog is popular (meaning 25,000+ hits a month), you can ask WordPress to turn on AdSense and Skimlinks on your blog. In order to petition for that, all you need to do is go here and fill in the form.
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@ Ashley
that’s the best way to get his account disabled. Just don’t click on ads of people you know. I know it’s tempting but remember people are paying for every click and they won’t want to pay for something that brings no return. Otherwise they’ll stop paying and nobody makes any money anymore. That’s why Adsense is so strict about invalid clicks.
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The problem is not that “they” do this or do that but “it”. Yep, it’s an automated system that detects unusual activity. It’s a classic Orwellian scenario. A machine determines that you are committing fraud and terminates your account for life. You neither get told why this happens nor do you get a human response to any request or appeal.
This is a problem with Google in general – automated and inhuman. No company has the resources to employ enough people to manage so many websites personally. Just can’t be done. Their software is excellent but it’s still only software.
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The reason it appears like “they” are waiting for you to accumulate money is because the system will be designed not to check your account until it’s likely to reach a payout soon. That’s because countless people start an account and never even make it past $10 let alone the payout threshold. It would be a waste of resources to review so many accounts that never get paid anyway.
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I’m sure that’s exactly how it works.
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What just escapes me is that sending blogs as e-mails to followers, which means they have no need to access your site to read your comments, seems to be self defeating if it diminishes your tally of the all important hits. But I am sure there is a good reason!
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I’d much rather not have the option for people to get my posts through email because I publish a lot of posts and I feel horrible about bombarding poor readers with all those emails.
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This is a BS review. Sounds like she got caught clicking her own ADs and encouraged clicks which is against the adsense TOS… i make hundreds every month off of adsense for over a year now and have had 0 problems with them.
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Saying that something sucks does not make for a review, stupid. For example, I think you totally suck. This wasn’t a review of you. It was merely an observation.
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They closed me 3 times and every time I had more then 3000$ ready to be paid. Not to mention the earning for that month.
In conclusion, they stole from me at least 15000$… legally, since somewhere in the TOS it writes, very-very small, something like this: “we have the right to close your account for whatsoever reason we want” … and after that it will say that the money/earnings will go back to the advertisers – yeah, right, like they’re stupid to give them back or something
They suck, they steal from their publisher, ban anyone for no reason just, like you said, to take their money. they can’t wait for the publishers to earn a little more so they can close their accounts for various reasons they seem to invent each time.
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