The Smart Guys and The Present Day

Fast forward to the present day, and many commentators feel that AdSense is progressively getting less effective, a theory that is backed up by the dramatic fall in earnings that many AdSense site owners have suffered in the recent past.

There are many reasons for this.

Firstly, there are many, many extremely clever marketers out there who spend a lot of time, effort and very probably money as well, trying to outsmart the guys at Google.

That is not to say that they cheat the system or do anything that necessarily directly contravenes Google’s Terms of Service.

Indeed, no sane person would ever do this, as the ‘big G’ retains the right to unilaterally close any account that they believe has cheated the system. And they then keep your earnings too!

But there is no doubt that these folks would bend the rules as much as possible and as often as they could, to gain an unfair marketing advantage, one that could see them earning huge AdSense checks from Google every month.

For example, as mentioned, you are not allowed to do anything that might be seen as encouraging a site viewer to click on your AdSense ads.

Fine – the smart guys just put pictures of pretty girls right next to the ads, so that a (male) viewers eyes were naturally drawn in that direction.

Google eventually stopped that practice by including it as a forbidden in their ToS.

So the guys who were making an AdSense killing from this one simple trick went back to the drawing board.

And basically what has therefore happened is that the AdSense rules have become both narrower and more tightly defined, which in turn has made it harder to earn a decent AdSense income.