News You Can Bruise for 2006 December 29

For a while I was trying out AdSense ads on this site. They never brought in more than a paltry sum, and I stopped doing them yesterday, rather abruptly, when Google cancelled my AdSense account.

The web is full of stories of these arbitrary cutoffs, which I can now confirm in their relevant details. You get an email saying "we've cancelled your account based on classified information" and that's it. You get a pro forma chance to defend yourself, but it's not much good because you don't know what happened. It also doesn't make much difference, because the response always comes back: "we re-ran our classified algorithm on our classified dataset and it gave the same result as before, buh-bye".

Fortunately, I have a friend in the online ad business. Ryan's Project Wonderful mostly serves ads for webcomics right now, which is fine by me, as it means fewer "KEYWORD? Buy it now at creepysite.com" ads.