I got banned by Adsense. But this is not the post you think it is. I am not going to complain about the balance I'll never be paid for, nor suggest that Adsense is a bunch of crooks, etc. I just want to bring light to another difficulty in monetizing Android applications to help others keep their accounts from getting banned.
I have an app in the market, Real Estate Droid, that, at points, open up Webviews with relevant information pulled from web services (currently mortgage rates and property values, soon to include many others). The pages loaded contain responses to queries made from inside the app. This was working out very well for me, because the pages were highly targeted to a valuable niche, giving me a very satisfactory eCPM on Adsense. Adsense does not approve of something I have done in conjunction with this. It is impossible to tell what they have a problem with, because it is their policy not to describe why an account is disabled. It could have been any of the following (or anything else I haven't thought of): 1) I chose to use Adsense for Content for these pages, rather than Adsense for Mobile, because the Android browser is fully capable of rendering traditional Adsense ads. 2) I forgot to display a privacy policy, though I fixed that in the course of my appeal. 3) They do not consider the content to be rich enough to warrant showing Adsense on it. (I kept the result pages relatively sparse in order to fit on a 480x320 screen with minimal scrolling). 4) G1 traffic seems to be piped through a limited number of proxies, so my traffic looks like it comes from 100 sources instead of 100000, and thus looks invalid. This is very unfortunate for me. No other ad networks that I've found (and I've looked into a LOT) offer the level of targeting or potential revenue per click levels offered by Adsense, so my strategy of going after a higher value/lower volume market is shot. This also means that I probably won't be able to take advantage of any Adsense Android SDK that may be released in the future. Another developer that I've been speaking to has used a somewhat similar strategy for monetizing his free app - the high score page is a web page that displays ads. He's already been banned by 2 other ad networks (with no explanation, of course). So if I plan to do anything ad-supported on Android, I'm going to have to go back to the model that has worked (well, at least somewhat) for me so far - untargeted, high-volume stuff like my slot machine application, using an Android SDK like Admob or Mojiva. Or more likely, I'll port what I have already to iPhone and see if I can accomplish something there. iPhone seems to have much more mature infrastructure for monetizing with ads, and fewer roadblocks (read: Google Checkout) to users buying apps. I'm not going to walk off in a huff and swear never to come back (I'd be throwing away way too much accumulated technical and domain expertise) but my hopes are growing dimmer. I wish you all continued luck in the request to entertain/inform some mobile users and make a few bucks in the process. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
