December 13, 2007
Google - You Win

Regular visitors might remember when I blacklisted Google AdSense about 3 months ago. They accused me of cheating their system, by artificially boosting my ad revenue - something I did not do (at least not on purpose). So I blacklisted Google, and started to look for another ad supplier.

That, however, has turned out to be quite a problem. Google literally has a monopoly when it comes to online advertising. There are a lot of other players on the market - and I have tried many of them - but none of the even comes close to the effectiveness and usability of Google AdSense.

Google AdSense has 4 major advantages over their competitors:

Availability: The most promising replacements of Google AdSense are Text-Link-Ads and Yahoo, but I cannot use either of them. TLA requires that I primarily place ads on my front page - which I do not want to do, and Yahoo is in beta, and currently only available to people within the USA.
Payment:Google will pay directly to your bank account, while most other advertising networks will pay you by check. Getting a check is probably fine for people in the USA, but I have to walk to the bank to cash it - and pay a currency conversion fee of $15. So for every $100 check I will only receive $85. Not good!
Quality: Almost all other advertising networks are filled with very bad ads. ValueClick even decided to put adult ads on my site (even though I specifically said they shouldn't). AdBrite (the one I tested earlier this week) mostly added advertisements for smilies, free college degrees and poker sites. I never got this junk when using Google AdSense.
Control: Google AdSense allows you to remove any ad that you do not like - it is easy and simply. Something that has turned out to be very hard, time consuming or both with most other advertising networks.

So, I have reactivated Google AdSense.

I could, of course, just remove all ads for good. But, the ad revenue more than pays for all the expenses I have on this site. And, my traffic has gone up over the last couple of months. In this month (December) I have an average of 8,200 daily visitors (absolute unique visitors), and about 14,000 daily page views. This is a considerable increase over the amount of traffic I had 3 months ago. I would be a fool not to take advantage of this.

But, I have added a few checks to prevent invalid clicks on my website in the future. I do not want to get into the same situation as before. I have also "banned" myself from seeing the ads. Meaning that I never see any ads myself, and thus cannot generate a lot of ad requests (especially in times when I am making changes, and is checking to see the result). I think this was the reason why Google believed that I previously was generating invalid traffic. Now, my personal activities will not influence the advertisements in any way.

So Google - you win. I still do not like being accused of something I did not do - but hey... if you cannot beat them, join them...