onlinemakingmoney:

Well, I guess meeting the quota for Google Adsense is now out of the question…I woke up this morning to check my email, only to find this in my email inbox:

Hello,

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. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the
effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the
advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how
you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

To be honest, I’m extremely pissed off. I was almost at the $100 mark to get paid, and a day or so before I could meet that amount, my account was disabled. After doing some research, I found that C4C on Tumblr was the cause, because it breaks the TOS in some way (though it was stated in the small print). I was getting social traffic, rather than getting organic traffic (i.e. asking people to click my ads and in return, I would click theirs.)

So, to those who are using C4C, please be careful! Find another alternative to monetize your Tumblr, or open an actual website, otherwise you could meet the same fate. I’m sorry to those who have been clicking my ads, you were a great help and you gave me hope! I’m sorry that you wasted your time, though. Thank you so, so much for helping me with the gas situation to get me to and from school…I really do appreciate it.

I just hope that none of you end up with disabled accounts too - Google may begin to crack down on this “fraud” soon and take your accounts out as well.

Actually, it’s not in fine print, and it’s told to you not only in the ToS, but when you sign up and they give you a short page of basic rules.

Not to mention, it’s pretty obvious that asking for clicks is fraud.

As someone who uses AdWords to advertise, it’s pretty crappy to find out someone’s been clicking your ads with no intention to buy, just to make money.  It costs the advertisers money every time you do that.  It’s not like you’re taking from the billion dollar Google corporation (they profit)…you’re actually taking from the advertiser, who is often just a little guy like me who’s extra money goes into ads because they’re trying to get their business off the ground (about 75% of businesses fail in the first year).