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Comment by irinotecan | Hacker News Reader

Moral of the story: Don't make too much ad revenue with AdSense or you will be accused of click fraud, and have no recourse.

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It's not too much ad revenue. It's suspicious ad revenue. He had 6% CTR, which is high, and also seemed to encourage his visitors click, at least to some extent.

It's not clear to what extent he encouraged clicks, but asking visitors to click your ads is like asking for your account to be terminated.

My visitors were usually smart and probably figured out on their own (since many of them had blogs - and AdSense accounts - themselves) that clicking on banners meant supporting the site.

Too bad Google shoots first and never asks any question.

It's really comfortable to live in a space without meaningful competition.

If I were an advertiser, why would I want to advertise on your site, if I know that visitors are supporting you by clicking but have no intention of converting? I care about the effectiveness of my ads. They are far less effective if visitors do this.

Ultimately the advertisers are paying for your AdSense income. It may not be your fault, but if you're providing less value to the advertiser, then it seems only fair that you don't participate, since your participation harms the whole market.

This is undeniably a problem with the current AdSense business model, but we all know this, choose to participate and accept the risk.

It would be wonderful if advertisers could pipe conversion rates back into Google so that ads would gravitate towards sites that generated greater conversion rates. This way, sites that have fans that decrease conversion rates will naturally sink to the bottom of the pile without much effort and would bubble up as soon as the behavior changes and conversion rates improve.

It seems a natural solution to the problem. Would you be able to pipe back conversion rates based on where the banner was shown?

That's pretty easy to do if they're using Google Analytics. It integrates with AdWords very well, and can track conversion rates (not just clicks) on their site for each ad.

Heck. If this data would be piped back to me, I would be able to target content towards whatever brought higher conversions and thus higher value for advertisers.

Other ad networks already do this and are pros at it. AdSense is the king of CPC, but not CPA.

Is there a comprehensive evaluation of competing ad networks for small sites?

What I got out of it was to open up independent Adsense accounts for different websites. If Google decides to shut one down, at least the others won't be affected.

This. My first thought was "why didn't he use separate accounts?" Of course the mailing address for the checks would be the same. So then get multiple P.O. Boxes. Then I think they require a phone number too? I'm sure Google has some employee who has thought of this.

Also wouldn't surprise me if one person having multiple AdSense accounts is a violation of their terms.

I'm sure there are restrictions for this, but at that kind of income it doesn't make sense not to spend a few hundred dollars and open up an LLC or something for at least the YouTube account.

I probably wouldn't have bothered with it until reading this, but I always hear every investment should be done with a separate entity and this seems to be no different.

I heard that this actually works. I've seen this advice over the internet: If your account is suspended just open another one. You have much higher probability of using it that getting the original working again.

The AdSense agreement specifically prohibits you from doing this. Of course, you might not get caught, but from a legal standpoint it's a Prohibited Use.

Actually the moral is "don't have too high of a click through rate". In the article he admits he told the viewers to click on the ads to get money to him from advertisers (violating the ToS). The viewers liked him and likely committed the click fraud for him. The money was returned to the advertisers.

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