Saturday, February 19, 2011

turn out the lights, the party is over

I'm a bit naive when it comes to the dark world of advertising and money making in general. After all, I'm a teacher, and teachers live in a sort of parallel universe where we work to prepare our students for the hard knocks of the work world but few of us have ever actually worked in it.

Google Ads has shut me down. In their recent email, they explain: "After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense account."

It was stupid of me to thank you in my blog for clicking on ads,which is what I think they consider invalid activity. I just never really thought it through. In my mind, those advertisers were getting attention, end of story. Google doesn't see it that way, and now I understand. I mean even I know that 'there is no such thing as a free lunch.'

That's okay. I like systems that work. I like to know that corruption, even unintentional, is not allowed free reign. I thought some of the ads were good, attractions in Denver, coupons, travel: the kinds of things that I would have been tempted to click if I were clicking. Oh well.

So it's back to an ad-free blog. I'm a little wiser, a little poorer, and unharmed. Don't worry. Tim will still get to take his Amazing Athletes class and his swimming class.

1 comment:

Jenny said...

Oh well, it was good while it lasted!

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