Adsense crisis

Chris D

Chris D

XenForo developer
Staff member
OK.

So circa 2009 someone made a post on www.valvetime.net which contained an image which was hosted on ImageShack.

Subsequently that image has been replaced with a hardcore pornography image. Google caught wind of this and suspended our only source of income and the only thing (bearly) covering the cost of our server: Adsense.

We have removed the offending image but they say we are still violating their terms and the thread they linked to is only an example of the content and there may be more -- we can't find any and they won't budge.

So we're now stuck.

We have ideas for other revenue streams. But more urgently we need at least something coming in from Advertising. Can someone please recommend some alternatives to Adsense?

We are no longer as busy as we once were, but we're by no means dead. we have up to 200 visitors online at a time 24/7 (mostly guests we're very popular via search engines).

Thanks all,

Chris
 
BamaStangGuy said:
http://www.buysellads.com is nice. Did they kill your whole adsense account or just ban the domain?
Click to expand...
Not sure. To add a further complication the site owner has left and assigned all responsibility over to one of the staff. So I suspect he has jumped ship and now closed his Adsense account.

We could try and sign up a new account but I suspect there's more porn somewhere. They certainly seemed to think there was still but they wouldn't tell us what other pages were violating their tos.
 
Skimlinks is pretty good.

As far as banner ads, there really isn't anything remotely close to as good as AdSense outside of selling the ad space directly yourself, but you would need to have buyers that *want* to buy ad space for that to work really (we have a little more than 2,000 unique *paying* advertisers that have bought ads directly to run on digitalpoint.com, and we make more through that than AdSense, but you also need the user base to support it).

If you make more than $25/month with AdSense, they offer email support, which can help you get your issue resolved and find out what other pages are violating their terms. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/2581949

We went through something similar not too long ago, and ended up just making a system that never shows AdSense on threads in certain areas (like General Chat) if the page being viewed has an image posted by a user. It always seems images are the problematic things. And their AdSense policies require the pages to be *extremely* family friendly... like a picture of a girl in a bikini violates their terms. Rather than messing with it or trying to police all that, it was easier to just disable AdSense on pages with user posted images in certain forum sections.
 
Thanks Matt

Yeah that's one of the extra revenue streams we're looking into.

Banners is our main concern right now.
 
digitalpoint said:
Skimlinks is pretty good.

As far as banner ads, there really isn't anything remotely close to as good as AdSense outside of selling the ad space directly yourself, but you would need to have buyers that *want* to buy ad space for that to work really (we have a little more than 2,000 unique *paying* advertisers that have bought ads directly to run on digitalpoint.com, and we make more through that than AdSense, but you also need the user base to support it).

If you make more than $25/month with AdSense, they offer email support, which can help you get your issue resolved and find out what other pages are violating their terms. https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/2581949

We went through something similar not too long ago, and ended up just making a system that never shows AdSense on threads in certain areas (like General Chat) if the page being viewed has an image posted by a user. It always seems images are the problematic things. And their AdSense policies require the pages to be *extremely* family friendly... like a picture of a girl in a bikini violates their terms. Rather than messing with it or trying to police all that, it was easier to just disable AdSense on pages with user posted images in certain forum sections.
Click to expand...

I would be interested in that add-on if you want to share. We just bought a 4 million post forum that is adsense banned and will be trying to get the domain unbanned. Being able to tell our adsense rep that we have taken that step will surely help.
 
So is the existing Adsense account now closed down? I had a warning a few months ago because an image looked like one of their adds. I removed it, and that was the last I heard of it.
 
You should cold call advertisement agencies. Most of my income is from that. You can also acquire your own advertisers, you can get good double digit cpms.

I removed Adsense some years ago and got even phone calls from Google Adsense Team to put them on again. And the adsense income was really rather low. But with 200 concurrent visitors you should make a good four figure income.
 
I too have had a similar crisis lately. My account is in good standing and the only thing wrong with it according to Google is SSL and Ad Targetting Issues. I've explained it in detail here if you're curious. Only linking you because you have an account and can view it. Anyway, I'm gonna play around with chitika, kontera and skimlinks. Gonna re-add back paid usergroups and robbo's donation manager and instead of using digitalpoints ad manager, I got @Daniel Hood to design one so that we can earn 100% commission for selling ad space to our members and I'll also use it to rotate affiliate links and banners. Read more about that here and here.
 
Last edited:
BamaStangGuy said:
I would be interested in that add-on if you want to share. We just bought a 4 million post forum that is adsense banned and will be trying to get the domain unbanned. Being able to tell our adsense rep that we have taken that step will surely help.
Click to expand...
Hmmm... I'd probably have to rewrite it from scratch to do *just* that... the way we have it now, it's just one small part of our whole ad delivery system for digitalpoint.com... For example, it queries our ad database to see if there are any self-sold banners to run (based on area of site, geolocation of the end user, etc.), then can apply an "AdSense restriction" flag for later down the chain in our ad delivery system.

Maybe someday, but honestly would more or less require a complete rewrite and end up with something that I wouldn't even be using myself... and since I don't have enough time in the day to build the stuff *I* need, it's not really at the top of the priority list at this point...
 
BamaStangGuy said:
I would be interested in that add-on if you want to share. We just bought a 4 million post forum that is adsense banned and will be trying to get the domain unbanned. Being able to tell our adsense rep that we have taken that step will surely help.
Click to expand...
Actually, now that I think about it... I might be able to roll something into our Ad Positioning addon without too much difficulty since it already has the ad delivery mechanism in there.
 
Chris Deeming said:
OK.

So circa 2009 someone made a post on www.valvetime.net which contained an image which was hosted on ImageShack.

Subsequently that image has been replaced with a hardcore pornography image. Google caught wind of this and suspended our only source of income and the only thing (bearly) covering the cost of our server: Adsense.

We have removed the offending image but they say we are still violating their terms and the thread they linked to is only an example of the content and there may be more -- we can't find any and they won't budge.

So we're now stuck.

We have ideas for other revenue streams. But more urgently we need at least something coming in from Advertising. Can someone please recommend some alternatives to Adsense?

We are no longer as busy as we once were, but we're by no means dead. we have up to 200 visitors online at a time 24/7 (mostly guests we're very popular via search engines).

Thanks all,

Chris
Click to expand...

As @DRE pointed out, I am working on an advertisement system. It's not as complex as @digitalpoint but it will definitely help monetize any XenForo forum. I have several plans for it. As we stand right now, people can add funds to their account and create ad campaigns. When creating a campaign they'll upload the banner they want displayed, specify the target url, along with their budgets (daily (0 results in no daily caps) and lifetime (required)). It makes use of bd Widget Framework, you set up ad slots with our widgets in any position that bd Widget Framework allows. When they set up a campaign, they select which widget to display in. Currently it only works with PayPal but adding more payment processors down the road shouldn't be too difficult. I log all clicks, the # of daily impressions, the # of life time impressions. I do not log each individual impression (I may decide to though).

As digitalpoint pointed out, this does require you have your own advertiser base so it isn't a true alternative to adsense.
 
Last edited:
digitalpoint said:
As far as banner ads, there really isn't anything remotely close to as good as AdSense outside of selling the ad space directly yourself, but you would need to have buyers that *want* to buy ad space for that to work really (we have a little more than 2,000 unique *paying* advertisers that have bought ads directly to run on digitalpoint.com, and we make more through that than AdSense, but you also need the user base to support it).
Click to expand...

not sure if I understand correctly...

Would you be able to share this "Banner Ad System" as an Addon ?
I mean the thing where you can sell Ads directly yourself, without any AdSense or Skimlinks, etc.


Many thanks!
 
I'd try to get Google back on board if you can though Chris, if only because any new revenue stream is going to be 60-90 days before you get any payment.
 
Nearly the same thing happened to me last month. They said I had ads showing in one of my more adult forum sections. No idea how as I had those sections not showing ads with if tags because of this exact reason. Instead I removed ads completely from the forums in all sections. Told them I have. And they unsuspended me. Sadly tho that seems to be where I make most my money. So once I finish my migration I'm going to try again. So maybe do that for now and only show them on the forum home and homepage. And try and get another ad provider to put in other places.

And Chris I +1 tribal fusion. I use them and they have been quite good over the years.
 
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