10 Reasons Why People Hate Google AdSense

By ahmedbAdvertising

There are many reasons why people hate AdSense and most of them are quite silly. I’ve taken the top 10 reasons below, and discussed each of them individually.

There are some valid concerns, definitely, but a few of them are just ridiculous.

10 – Poor email support / Poor support overall

This is a fair point – AdSense can and should do more in terms of tech support.

However, when you consider the sheer number of people who use AdSense and even if you place the percentage of people who need tech support generously low, that’s still a lot of users.

I’d like to see the Google AdSense team do more (they’ve improved since last year, IMO), especially in replying to all email support queries within 12 hours. Impossible? Hardly.

9 – Google allows AdSense ads on scrapper sites

Google is in favor of using algorithms as far as possible to weed out the trash, and to their credit they’ve done a lot over at Blogspot to reduce the splog-effect.

But MFA-sites are NOT going to go away, and to combat the problem Google needs to do manual checks both at the point of application (maybe introduce minimum conditions for joining – such as site age, traffic, etc) and at any random time every 6 months (or 1 year).

To get the scrappers out of the system sites need to be checked manually – although this raises another nasty problem where personal bias on ads can mean the difference between a site being seen as heavily optimized and blatant spam.

But why are people crying about Google allowing ads on scrapper sites? How does this affect you?

8 – Smart Pricing

If you don’t know what smart pricing it, read this article from Jennifer Slegg and then this followup by Loren Baker covering Google’s response.

It’s the way AdSense / AdWords works – deal with it.

7 – Doesn’t pay enough

A problem of expectations and nothing to do with Google or Google AdSense.

AdSense is usually a function of traffic – if you have low traffic you might want to head the TLA way and push your PageRank up.

And if you sign up to AdSense expecting it to pay all your expenses, you’d better be prepared to put in the hard work to build up your site’s traffic to that level.

Don’t rely on just one source of income – and depending on your niche and site traffic, AdSense could be your worst or your best earner.

6 – Ugly ads

I disagree – but maybe that’s because I’ve been using AdSense for so long. I do think that Google have done a decent job in how their their ads blend in well with content – and on the most part I’d blame the advertisers, not the ad network, for the quality of the ads and ad text.

5 – Don’t allow arbitrage

Losely translates into:

Don’t allow us to cheat by going against their TOS.

Boo hoo.

I’m all for arbitrage, but you have to make sure you don’t get caught 🙂

4 – Dont allow banned accounts to be reinstated

Never had an account banned (touch wood) so I can’t say much about this. If it really is a zero-tolerance policy then it’s not necessarily a bad thing – although accounts that are wrongly banned for suspicious activity should be reactivated once the mistake is discovered. Google will only get better at detecting fraud though, so the number of false positives should decrease.

3 – They’re everywhere

A testament to its simplicity and ease of use. Doesn’t apply unless you hate Google, which is a whole different story.

2 – Poor targeting

Are you saying this relatively or objectively? Relative to other networks, AdSense is actually much better. And when it comes to depth of inventory, Google is usually ahead as well.

There are certain cases where relevant ads are not presented, but those cases are isolated and there’s a fix for every one of them.

1 – It feeds the Google Borg

Yes, it does.

I can live with that, even if sometimes your earnings per click get slashed for no obvious reason and AdSense support or an optimization expert assigned to you does absolutely nothing to explain why this happens. It’s annoying, but instead of complaining, you need to adapt, find alternatives and fix things on your end.

—–

While I was writing this list I realised that I might come out sounding like a Google apologetic – please no 🙂 I’m just trying to put forward both sides of the story as I see them.

So, have I missed out on any reason why you would hate AdSense?

16 thoughts on “10 Reasons Why People Hate Google AdSense”

  3. I just set up a free video sharing site through magnify.net called designtube.magnify.net and they have google adsense ads all over my site. Magnify offers to display their google ads 50% of the time and mine 50% of the time if I supply my adsense id. I applied to adsense for an id but they knocked me back stating that the site was outside their guidelines. What? The ads are already approved by google for magnify.net to display on that site. I just wanted a piece of the existing adsense action. To hell with you google adsense, I have no choice but to take this personally. That’s why I hate adsense.

  5. I hate the f*cking ugly google ads…if they can only make it look better then i would be fine with it… but darn… it’s f*cking ugly…

  8. Great list! For those of you looking for an AdSense alternative, I highly recommend WidgetBucks. I’ve been earning almost twice as much with WidgetBucks compared to AdSense. Plus, the ads are optimized for WordPress, Blogger, and even TypePad. Check out this WidgetBucks review for some more info.

  9. All of the area about what I hate about Google Adsense has been covered Google just want you to sign up with their Adsense and thats it. Rather go with Adwords to increase traffic and generate income with less Google Adsense.

  11. 1 – If you try to set up an Adwords account after midnight you often get this message: “We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it. Please note that using your browser’s back button in AdWords can increase the likelihood of errors. If you think this was the cause of your error, please try again without using the back button.”
    2 – Their search engine is rapidly becoming a dinosaur. The way their search engine is set up forces you to start out with a broad search. You then have to remove many items that were posted between 2000 and 2007. Their search engine should only search for the most recent postings on any topic. They could set up a separate GOOGLE.COM/Archives site. Also any site that is reduntant or hasn’t had any activity in the last year should be removed.

  12. I’ll take the bait. 😉

    If the complaint is that Adsense should not be allowed to display on sites that display syndicated content with the aim of getting some ad revenue, then bear in mind that the content of other people’s sites also appears on technorati with Adsense ads right alongside.

    Ahum. It’s a lot easier to keep out Technorati, who respects robots.txt than most scrapers. Just remember that many bloggers want to write and earn and less be busy with the technical aspect of a blog. So it could be that they have no sympathy for your technological knowledge at all.

    If one of my sites has been optimised better than the original source of the content, then I think that the possibility of someone clicking on an ad is fair compensation for the effort I have put in in getting to that stage.
    My sites also offer free exposure for other writers.

    I won’t share my opinion on automated sites, surely not here on a site specifically aimed at bloggers who want to earn a buck, mainly with their content, but I’d love to paraphrase the concept.

    I run a torrent site and thus expose the music/art of popular artists and popularize their content and themselves. Being rather web-experienced my website ranks well for ‘torrent’ search queries. I consider it a logical merit to earn a buck (or more) with ads, exposing the content of worldwide respected musicians.

    Disclaimer: I do not own or manage any site exposing authors, artists or content which isn’t mine.

  13. I run several automated blogs – referred to in this article as “Scrapper Sites” (Scraper Sites?)

    If one of my sites has been optimised better than the original source of the content, then I think that the possibility of someone clicking on an ad is fair compensation for the effort I have put in in getting to that stage.

    My sites also offer free exposure for other writers.

    If the complaint is that Adsense should not be allowed to display on sites that display syndicated content with the aim of getting some ad revenue, then bear in mind that the content of other people’s sites also appears on technorati with Adsense ads right alongside.

  14. You want to know another major complaint. God only knows why you can’t choose the placement of the “Ads by Google” text. Wouldn’t it seem an obvious configuration option to be able to choose “left or right” for horizontal ads and “top or bottom” for vertical ads?

  15. I would add that they don’t consistently apply their TOS. I can not run AdSense Ads because my blog focuses on tobacco. The problem is two other blogs that focus on tobacco are allowed to run them. What gives?

  16. I would add: no scaling ad sizes. It seems to me that for every ad-format, there are about a dozen variations that could hold the same ads, but allow for more flexibility in placement.

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