AdSense rejection

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Lets face it, getting rejected is a tough pill to swallow. Even, as in this case, the rejection came from a multi national company with billions of yearly revenues. if you want to add AdSense as a possible blog income source you need to read on.

Wherever you look around on how to best monetize your blog you will find that the first thing which will be mentioned is to use AdSense. There are literally thousands and thousands of blogs you can find on Pinterest and elsewhere which tell you how easy it is to earn money with your blog. Especially if you’re looking for blogs which promised to teach you how to monetize a new blog in the beginning with very low traffic.

This sounded all good and well to me until I followed that advice and applied for a new AdSense account with Google. It took Google about two days to respond with a very nice email. You can see the screenshot of the email below and as he can read the response was that “it does not meet our program criteria. Therefore, we are unable to accept you into our program.”

No blog income from AdSense

After receiving this email, I went straight to my AdSense account page and found the following screen which states: “You need to fix some things to use AdSense”. Well that was a rather rude awakening. What was I doing wrong ? I was following exactly what every single blog post I have read on how to monetize your blog has proposed. And yet the brutal truth is that according to AdSense my site has

– False claims of downloadable or streaming content
– Linking to content that does not exist
– Redirecting users to irrelevant and/or misleading webpages
– Text on a page unrelated to the topic and/or business model of the website.

Unworthy new blog

Reading through this bullet point list is like being accused of trying to defraud users. obviously I wanted to get a little more clarity on the whole on-boarding process and figure out what I can do to get accepted. AdSense was part of my strategy to add to the overall blog income.

It took only a couple of minutes of research to find a so-called Forum under the Google support domain. You can find the link here.

As you can see from the following screenshot a Google product expert calmly and compassionately explains to one of the applicants: “… why exactly your side would have to be among the 4% lucky ones to make it“. This almost sounds like Dirty Harry went to town the only missing part at the end was  “Well, do ya, punk?“.

I do understand that these experts have to review and explain rejections all the time. They may feel that they are guarding the quality of the AdSense product however not every new website is meant to be a low-quality page which rips off internet users. As such I would hope to get better support from Google or their affiliates.

The other rejection criteria is the evergreen: “Too many such sites online already and no more are needed. Look for other ways to monetize.”. Wow in other words, as far as AdSense is concerned, the internet has peaked. This is certainly bad news for any one who is after generating new blog income.

It is hard to believe that in 2019 we will be able to find any area which is not yet saturated. You can find blogs about everything. Are you looking for blogs about dolls how many can you find. Ask Google. Looking for blogs about breaded cats, Ask Google. and on and on you go.

Below is my request for clarification on that matter.

You can read the complete exchange here.

Selling Oxygen On Venus

I would wager that in 2019 there are few topics which are not saturated.

Although, come to think of it, “Selling oxygen on Venus” could be a rarely used topic. I may be tempted to investigate this for AdSense purposes. Though quite honestly I don’t think this topic would create a lot of blog income.

Interestingly, the very same day I received the rejection from AdSense, I also received an invitation to spend money on promoting the very same blog through Google Ads. The response from the Product Experts was : “Google will take money from you to advertise any site  (within reason) but the sites those adverts appear on are very, very strictly vetted ... “. Let me paraphrase this for you to drive home the point.

Google will take your money to advertise your shitty site but will not touch your site with a long pole.

This may sound like I am bitter but I can guarantee that I am not. I am simply working my way through the labyrinth of generating money online and what it takes to bump my blog income. Which companies you can work with as a partner and which ones ignore the little guys. I believe that all companies basically follow the same trajectory. In the startup-phase, they are willing to bend over backwards to gain new users. Then there is the cruise-phase when things gain traction and people like the service and offerings.  The value proposition is in line with the overall market.

In the last phase, the profit-phase, when the company becomes too large, they start cutting back on customer support and tailor their business model to accommodate the big players more and more, to the point where they become a completely different company.

I saw this happening with Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, even Fiverr. And if Microsoft is any guide, the only way this will reverse is when the company is losing market share for extended periods of time.

Also, check out my response to Linking to content that does not exist.

Life without AdSense blog income

Where do you go next after AdSense rejected your entry into the club ? You do always have the option to try again at a later point, once your blog attracts more visitors. Depending on the size of your audience I find it hard to believe that you will be rejected after you get millions of monthly eyeballs to your blog.

There are other options as well. Take for example this list from ComScore.

​I did some initial research and looked at the pre-requirements to join some of those ad networks. Media.net was the on choice which came out on top for me. You have to simply go to their sign-up page and enter your information. After only one day I have received the green light from Media.net and was sent an email which guided me to complete the sign-up process.

After setting the password, I had to provide my name, the company name, as well as my physical address ( or that of the company ). The whole process took less than 3 minutes to complete. The result was me being able to see the PubConsole – Dashboard.

I really like this approach because it will spare you the effort to enter all of the required information until after you have been accepted. I would say that this is off to a great start. You can see the dashboard above which will hopefully have some real numbers in a few short weeks and possibly adding to my blog income.

Below is the first official ad implementation. I added a blue background color to it to improve visibility here.

<div id="885680419" style="background: #4466FF; padding: 10px"><script type="text/javascript" >
  try {
    window._mNHandle.queue.push ( function ( ) {
      window._mNDetails.loadTag ( "885680419", "728x90", "885680419" );
    } );
  }
  catch ( error ) {
  }
</script></div>

… and this is the result.

Ad revenue streams of wealth

Well, not really. It all depends on the amount of traffic you can create plus the CPM, the number of times people click on the ads, as well as the current CPC. These are all going to be important factors for your blog income. For reference,
CPM  stands for Cost Per Mil. It is the amount of money you get for 1000 ad impressions from the ad network.
CPC stands fro Cost Per Click. It is the amount of revenue you earn for each unique click on the ad

There are certain rules and best practices associated with the placement of ads onto your blog. I will not get into the details in here. Needless to say though that you should never ever click on ads yourself or encourage people to click on them to improve your counts. Doing so is a disservice not only to the ad network but ultimately to you as well. Trying to game the system can result in your account termination and will hurt the revenue of every blog and web site which utilizes this ad network.

I will start out very slowly with the ad placement on my blog and mainly focus on a tight and unobtrusive integration rather then an increased revenue. The important thing is that I do under no circumstances want to destroy the blog through ad-overkill. While at the same time I would be happy if I could recover some of my investments along the way.

For me a successful ad strategy would be to break even within 3 months of operating ads, which is by the end of February 2020.