I've had great success with adsense on http://blingmyspace.com .

I'm also tring Kanoodle's Bright Ads, but the don't seem to perform as well.

AdSense, in my opinion, is great. It is easy to integrate, and the return isn't too bad, especially for its simplicity.

Not much else to say. I don't even optimize my pages (my site's a forum, actually, like Daniweb) but that's not really a problem for me. The ads are performing... okay, at least, I don't have to spend time tweaking them. If I did, my return would most definitely shoot up a lot more, though.

Read the horror stories of those who've been summarily "banned" from Google's AdSense program. I shrugged them off as the whines and complaints of those who were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, until it happened to me on a poetry forum I used to run.

I put up flyers in a lot of the local coffee shops / 'net cafes that I frequent. I do a lot of my work in these places, and used my laptop to check my AdSense account. Apparently any hits I got from OTHER PEOPLE from those locales were then seen as fraudulent clicks, and it was "sayanora". Either that, or the geographic density (most hits coming from my home town) caused suspicion. I'll never know, because Google won't say.

Now, that site didn't make me much money - the ads basically covered the hosting fee, which is all I wanted.

However, the ban isn't just for that site, the ban is for ME. So that means my commercial site(s), and any potential commercial sites, are also banned from participation.

I was worried about weird stuff like that, for instance, the place i work for has one IP address and a huge network. People could visit the site via any of the thousands of computers on the network and the ip would show up as the same! I've been talking to my co-workers about my site too, and most of them have visited. Hopefully google has some other way of detecting who visits your site, beyond an ip address, what if you check google adsense at a public wifi place like a library? I don't know, you'd think they would have features built in to prevent stuff like that.

Those are all issues. Google doesn't publish or discuss how they determine fraudulent clicks, there is no discussion or recourse, and no one there will respond to any questions about the issue. The decision is final and permanent. Plus, the decision seems to come after your site has built up some speed, and always towards the end of the month when you have a large payment pending, according to many of the accounts. That was true in my case.

I'm sorry, I'm extremely cynical about the AdSense program, and refuse to click any AdSense ads, anywhere, ever.

I didn't want to go public with this but I guess I just will. When DaniWeb first started, we were using the AdSense program and making about $5-10 a day. Our third month, we were kicked out of the program for "fraudulent clicks". After explaining our case to Google, they actually reinstated us back into the program. We missed one month's worth of revenue, which was just barely $100 anyways.

Well, I'm understandably curious. What was your "case"? How did you get a human to respond to you? In my situation, I emailed them immediately, asking what clicks were fraudulent, could they be filtered out, etc. The response was an auto-reply basically telling me to go away and never bother them again. So, another email, explaining what I thought happened (pretty much what I wrote upstream in the thread),with another form email response, similarly shutting me down.

Again, I'm cynical, but I have to imagine you got a favorable response due to your growth rate. Google is a business, and you make them a lot of money, I imagine. Someone saw that potential and decided to intervene and overrule their vaunted, flawless, secret algorithm.

I also find fault with the fact that they shut me out of my account, and yet somehow they don't have the technology to stop serving the ads. I had to manually remove the AdSense code, because even though I was somehow guilty of generating fraudulent clicks, they continued to serve ads to my site. It was alright for them to continue to make money from my site, but not for me to do so.

The system is seriously flawed. That said, though, I'm a hypocrite - given a hearing ear and a reinstatement, I'd host them again.

So my advice is, use it. See what happens. But don't be surprised if 2 days before the check is cut you get an accusatory email...

Thanks for the info., understandable why you would be hesitant, but you probably gave a lot of people some more faith in adsense. Hopefully none of us go through any bad situations like others have experienced.

Hello everyone,

I have heard those stories as well. I just started using AdSense as part of our free hosting offer. I hope something like that will not happen. I also hope that Google will do something about this and atleast provide better support when it does happen.