How AdSense vigilantes earn money
Whenever I see a page that clearly violates Google AdSense TOS I tend to ignore it. To me, I’m better of working on my own websites rather than going around grassing people up. A friend of mine on the other hand is a big AdWords advertiser and he can’t stand people getting away with click fraud, which is more than understandable.
One day he ended up on some website that asked people to click on their AdSense ads. Outraged, he contacted the AdSense advertisers who appeared on these ads by entering the url in his browser and informed them about the click fraud. Advertisers in their turn thanked him for the warning and went ahead to complain to Google and ask for a refund. Turns out one of the guys has actually lost thousands of dollars with that particular campaign. Soon they have received a full refund from Google. A friend of mine was then contacted by one of these guys and was offered $1000 as a thank you for saving the company a lot of money.
Apparently a few guys go around doing this full time and earn good money. I assume they are a bit more shameless and actually ask for that “thank you”.
July 30th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Wow….I be someone could be making some nice change by doing this! Interesting, seems like it would be time consuming too.
July 30th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
wow, the advertiser must have set up a nice tracking for spending thousands of dollars without any ROI…
July 31st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Thats a really good bit of info. I bet there are poeple making some good cash by doing this but, like you, I prefer just to spend my time doing my own thing. Every little helps though, so watch out you adsense fraudsters
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 am
I do that, actually I do all the time. When I see something wrong including spelling, etc.
It’s not just trying to grab a reward.
If we understand that this sort of thing will cause price’s inflation from the publisher perspective we all should be aware of it.
Cheers
Lucio Ribeiro
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:30 am
BTW Ilia article subbmited to Sphinn
sphinn (dot) com/story/63229
Cheers
Lucio Ribeiro
August 3rd, 2008 at 7:03 am
I really want to make money with Google Adsense.But ,No one click
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:58 am
Too bad im not successful on trying adsense.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Lucio Ribeiro
Thank you but I think the story has been removed :S
August 7th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Like you, most of the time I just ignore things like adsense violations and spammy pages. It’s not like I’ve never tread into a gray area either, so live and let live (most of the time). Like Lucio said though, adsense fraud raises the prices for everyone. I know people who are spending a lot of money on adsense and would report someone in a second if they saw a violation, and I’m sure there are plenty others. I’ll admit to reporting a spammy page to google though, because they were targeting the same keyword as me, and alls fair in love and war.
August 18th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Your very last sentence threw me off. You meant to write “ask” but you wrote “as.” Should I ask for that thank you?