The other day I got an email telling me that my Google AdSense account had been disabled because they had detected invalid click activity. It turns out my girlfriend had been clicking on the ads to try and make me more money, but not because I asked or did anything to promote that. What can you do in a situation like that? I sent an appeal to Google. We'll see what happens.
It really bothered me to have the account disabled, because I had just been reading this book, "Free", and even though it was very irritating, it made me think about experimenting with how much play time I give away for free in my online games, and my ideas about prices in general, and I was a litte bit inspired to try and give things away for free in order to get more traffic, and therefore more ad revenue. Now I need to think some more about what to try.
In the meantime, I decided to try putting up AdBrite ads, which I discovered when I googled 'Alternatives to Adsense'. I also put up an ad from the Advertise Your Game service. It is interesting to learn about these things, and I am curious to see how they work out.
See the next blog entry about this.