Monday, February 15, 2016

AdSense, Pricefixer, and Invalid Clicks

Since this blog has lately been used to document fake "reports" about nutraceuticals, you might wonder about some of the products in the ads appear alongside those posts.

The ads are put there by Google AdSense (which I only started using in late January 2016), and I have no way of screening them (that I know of) and don't have time to do that anyway.  So I'm not endorsing any of those products, but at least their ads aren't downright dishonest, as are the fake CNN reports used to sell Neurocell, Synagen, etc.

Of course, not all products do as advertised -- you can thank the first amendment for that.  If you buy anything advertised on this site, you do so at your own risk.

But nothing's stopping you from clicking on the ads to check the products out.  If you do that -- even without buying the product -- you help pay for this blog!


Update July 25, 2016:

I don't think it's possible to unsubscribe to AdSense, but I did go in and checked the box for them not to display any ads, so hopefully there aren't any ads anymore.

As above, it seemed pretty strange for me to be advertising what are most likely fake products, while exposing some of the underlying fakery.

I only signed up for AdSense because I thought I might get some money out of it.  So far, since January, I've only got about $55.  I get anywhere from 200-600 hits a day, about 9000-10,000 per month (at least that's what google tells me).  So it's a ridiculously low return in any event.  $50 to me for something like 60,000 page views -- i.e. it takes 10 page views for me to make a penny; one thousand page views is one dollar.

And to add insult to injury, for some reason they gave me zero dollars for the month of June, citing "invalid traffic."  I have no idea what that means.  I sometimes google for my old posts in order to create working links for them, but at most I click on my own posts about 10 times a month (out of what I believe are 10,000 legitimate page views (most of which come from google searches, by the way).  I'd be very interested to know what Google AdSense thinks I've been doing that gives it the right to even withhold the usual $10 for 10,000 page views, but I don't care enough to follow up with them (I'm sure it would take more time than it's worth for me to get a clear response).

So given that I've been conflicted about the ads on this blog from the outset, you won't see them any more until further notice.  You're welcome!

PS -- Googling probably would give me an answer to my problem.  On quick look, I found, but did not carefully read, this:  https://allbloggingtips.com/protect-adsense-from-invalid-clicks/.  But I like the idea of staying ad-free, especially since the non-zero returns were so low.
  

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