So you’re an ad publisher, and you work damn hard for the few clicks that you get.  Then you come across another site using the same ads program that you use and they’re obviously violating the TOS for ad placement and color scheme and everything else.  Of course you assume that since their ad placement is so sneaky that their click ratio must sky high.  They’re practically rolling in the money.  You struggle for your measly 2% click ratio and hate that they must have a really high click ratio.  They should be banned, why aren’t they?

When this question crosses your mind, and it will, DO NOT go to the nearest forum and post the website in a thread asking: This site violates TOS, why aren’t they banned?  Threads like that are annoying, and they all have 2 responses (both correct).

The first response you’ll get is that the ad publisher has a lot of clients and it takes time to find sites that violate the TOS and warn/ban them.  This is true too, take googles adsense for instance.  It is published on millions (probably billions) of web pages, there is no way for google to be vigilant enough to comb through each page and make sure it doesn’t violate the TOS.

That’s fine you say, we should all report it so they get banned.  And really, if it bugs you that much go ahead and report it.  I doubt you’ll get many, if any, forum members to report it with you though.  The other response you’ll get from those forum members is that you shouldn’t worry about those other sites that violate the TOS and worry more about making your site more profitable.  You could spend the time you’re worrying about other websites on building links for yours, adding content to yours, checking webstats, etc.

Both forum responses are correct, you won’t find much sympathy on forums, so don’t bother trying to find any.  Instead of fuming over the other sites ad placement work on your own site.  The secret with this is that their click ratio isn’t as good as you think it is.  They go through all the bother of violating the TOS and most of them will sit at a 5-6% click ratio.  Those extra few %s isn’t worth the possibility of being dropped by the thing that makes you money.

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Tags: ad program, tos, violate

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.