Discussion
After 20 Years, I Turned Off Google AdSense for My Websites
TeaVMFan: I did the same and switched to Ethical Ads (no cookies, tracking etc.) on https://frequal.comEthical Ads: https://www.ethicalads.io/
brycewray: (2025)
bluepeter: > Plus, turning off the ads should more clearly classify my blog as “non-commercial” for the various legal tests that impose greater liability on commercial actors.Anyone know what these might be offhand? I think federal trademark law may sting more if used commercially. But what else could he be referring to?
datadrivenangel: Mostly around copyright issues, but probably also potential defamation as well.
BLKNSLVR: I do find it interesting that the author specifies they use an ad blocker effort also wanting to view the industry 'from the inside'. I'm not sure there isn't a level of hypocrisy there, albeit understandable.As staunchly anti-advertising, I wouldn't include advertising on anything I publish personally, but then I also don't publish anything, so I have no pressure to change my stance. I think I've convinced myself that my opinion doesn't matter to those who may be able to earn a decent stream from advertising (as much as I dislike that, and add much as I dislike my opinion being value-less).
beej71: I had some sites that used it years ago ca. 2006. $500/mo at peak. Then one month it suddenly halved for no apparent reason. And it kept dropping. After a while or just wasn't with the ugliness. And I learned to never count on Google.Since then I've become anti-ad and haven't had any for years. I am sorry for my embarrassing lapse in judgment. :)
BLKNSLVR: This is pointing out something that seems to be deeply human, it's not intended as a personal dig, because I think I'd be in the same boat:It's interesting, not unexpected and not un-understandable, that your opinion started changing as the dollar value decreased. I greatly dislike what this says about the effect of money on the human psyche. It's as old as time, but this hack hasn't been patched and I don't think it can be: Humans will sell their souls for a price.I forgive you for your lapse in judgement. You are human after all - not intended as an insult ;)
breput: Several years ago, I ran a niche hobbyist website and incorporated Adsense (because why not?!?). The site featured a fuzzy search function since it referenced tens of thousands of named parts. The search result page would echo the (sanitized) search term followed by the matching results - along with recent search terms in the right sidebar.One day, some spambot hit the site and started searching for terms like "mesothelioma". Adsense would see that page with "mesothelioma" in the sidebar, query for it, and served up the ambulance chaser's paid ads.I didn't realize this was happening for several weeks since this low volume site was earning very little and I never even hit the minimum withdrawal limit. Suddenly I was earning $50 - $100 - per day. This lasted for a few weeks but before I could transfer the earnings, Google locked the AdSense account due to abuse. It might surprise you, but Google support was not helpful and after a series of reviews, they permanently shut down Adsense for this site.Therefore, I also turned off Google Adsense for my websites.
rhoopr: There’s an interesting conversation to be had about ad sponsorship on web content when the share of people just getting summarized results from {LLM chatbot of choice} is increasing and siphoning actual views.
kevin_thibedeau: It's an act of self-protection. I'm not anti-advertising. I'm anti-running-untrusted-software on my property. If they had stuck to adwords and static images with no invasive tracking I'd let their ads run. But the surveillance capitalists can't help themselves and want to run their 50MB spyware payload on my computer. I say no to that garbage.
paulcole: Easy to become anti-ad after they stop paying lolLike me becoming anti-my-girlfriend after she dumped me
drnick1: Aren't most people using ad blockers these days, making the revenue that one can generate with ads trivial unless traffic is enormous?
traverseda: About 30% from what I could find.
donatj: I have a tool on my website that gets about 250k unique views per day. During COVID I decided to put a single ad on the page to try to make up for my wife's lost income. It was for a time bringing in close to $500 a month, and was a nice little side income.My wife never returned to work, we had kids and she has stayed at home with them. As such the ad has stayed up. Last I checked though it is bringing in something like $36 a month. I get a payout from Google every couple months.I'm considering taking it down just because the payoff is so low. It's honestly barely breaking even with the added expense of complicating my taxes.
greyface-: There's no contradiction; ad blocker usage is common within the industry.
beloch: "I never saw most of the offending ads because of my adblocker, so I didn’t notice the changes or experience any irritation personally. "--------If you run a website that serves ads, whitelist it in your adblocker so you can see what your own damned site looks like to people who are still rawdogging the world wide web.
dotancohen: I believe that the old proverb is "sour grapes".
dotancohen: The problem is not the marketing of services and products.The problem is the vector for tracking and for installing malware on users' browsers. I'd actually love to be notified when interesting products are available - but I block ads out of the defensive stance that the advertising industry pushed many people into.
wfme: Popular in tech circles, but largely unused outside them.
vetrom: It seems to me at its root, that it's a question of available ad attention, and the value thereof.The classic value prop for ads has been so badly destroyed by bad curation and content invasiveness that the basis value of that attention has dropped trough the floor. The growing prevalence of ad blocking is only a symptom of that.This has become bad enough it even invades special interest nonprofit rags like the AAA, American Legion, and USPSA newsletters, for example.
Nevermark: > Nor is it an argument that companies can’t do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there’s a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.The three problems I see are:1. People who imagine no content moderation would be a utopia.2. People who imagine content moderation should be perfect (of course by which I mean there own practical, acknowledged imperfect measure. Because even if everyone is pro-practicality, if they are pro-practicality in different ways, we still get an impossible demand.)3. This major problem/disconnect I just don't ever see discussed:a) If a company is actively promoting some content over others, for any reason (free speech allows for many motives here), they should be held to a MUCH higher standard for their active choices, vs. neutral providers.b) If a company is selectively financially underwriting content creation, i.e paying for content by any metric (again, free speech allows for many motives), they should be held to be a MUCH higher standard, for their financed/rewarded content, vs. content it relays without financial incentive.Host harbor protections should be for content made available on a neutral content producer, consumer search/selection basis.As soon as a company is injecting their own free speech choices (by selecting for users, or paying for selected content), much higher responsibilities should be applied.A neutral content site can still make money many ways. Advertising still works. Pay for content on an even basis, but providing only organic (user driven) discovery, etc. One such a neutral utility basis, safe harbor protection regarding content (assuming some reasonable means of responding to reports of harmful material), makes sense.Safe harbors do not make sense for services who use their free speech freedoms to actively direct users to service preferred content, or actively financing service preferred content. Independent of preferred (i.e. the responsibility that is applied, should continue to be neutral itself. The nature of the companies free speech choices should not be the issue.)Imposed selection, selective production => speech => responsibility.
vitorgrs: You would be surprised to how little people use adblockers. Old data, but on my country for a major tech website, the number was 13%.
add-sub-mul-div: The conversation should be about the fact that the advertising won't disappear, it will inevitably move to LLM output where it will be seamless/unblockable and undisclosed.There's a law of conservation (or growth, really) of ad impressions.
influx: Most people who ran AdSense were extremely careful not to look at the ads on their own site, because Google might flag them for intentionally inflating clicks or views.
vitorgrs: When I was a teen, like, 15 years ago or so, my Google Ads account got permanently banned because I made the mistake of clicking on my own ad. :)
DivingForGold: I stopped buying Google Keywords after about 2 years, saw no difference in sales
AJ007: Every person and company I know who had an Adsense account was banned and not paid. Two of them were banned for terms violations which were things Google reps told them to do. Endless conspiracy theories on this, no idea.
princevegeta89: Well, I think either way, Internet ads are dead for the most part. They have been dead for many years now. They started exactly the same way and went through the same flow. There were all kinds of ads: ads to install junk, ads that were totally misleading, ads that were very sexual in nature just to tempt users into clicking them, and ads that were totally irrelevant to the topic of the website or the user's interests.But then it got so bad that people started using ad blockers long ago, and they got rid of this mess. Later, companies slowly started moving away from Internet advertising in general, and when the mobile and smartphone market started to take off, all the money flowed into that world instead. If you look at the way ads work in the mobile industry, even today, they are full of junk and incentivize users to install apps and perform specific actions. There is an equal amount of junk and misleading content in mobile ads today, like there used to be in Internet ads more than a decade ago. But right now, we are at that point. Mobile ads will also start getting muted one way or the other, and there will be huge incentive and opportunity sitting on top of that right there.To add to this specific article, though, I would say it would have hardly made a difference anyway for the author in 2025.
sanswork: [delayed]
echelon: > I forgive you for your lapse in judgement.I "don't forgive you" for considering this a lapse in judgment, because you still have some things to learn. (I'm kidding of course. All of this framing is rather silly.)beej was doing what was best for them at the time. There were no victims. beej sold a service to an enterprise until it didn't make sense anymore.Moralizing something that happened 20 years ago is wild. It literally does not matter. beej didn't kill anyone, didn't ruin their self esteem, didn't steal. This is not "soul selling".Money isn't evil. Working for money and selling for money are not evil. You're going to have to do a whole lot more to meet that threshold for most people.We should stop casting stones at people unless they're really assholes. This is nothing.
sanswork: It's been like 10 years since I worked in the space but I'm pretty sure showing adsense on search results like that has been against the tos for a very long time unless you get a specific search feed(which is basically impossible these days and even 15 years ago was limited to companies like ask.com)
shermantanktop: Sounds like a footgun waiting to go off? Unless Adsense is pretty explicit about this, beyond some language buried in a TOS.
glaslong: This is why I greatly prefer podcasts where the hosts read the ads. If you're going to take ad money, you better be willing to sell it with your own voice. All else is a descent into scam ad hell.
zelphirkalt: I am guessing these companies were not big enough to make enough of a fuss and have a good legal team? Google likes making money, and if there is the slightest reason to not have to pay someone, then they are gonna make use of that reason. Might even make it onto someone's KPI list of "prevented fraud".
breput: Interesting. It seems like a ToS violation would have been worthy of a warning and revoking the offending earnings, but nope, it was no mercy or review.
sanswork: [delayed]
cabaalis: It seems with AI models this space is ripe for on-domain ad sales as a SaaS. Just pay an invoice to "advertise here" Have an AI make sure the links adhere to content policies. Don't track visitors or charge per click. Just pay a fee and get the banner.
BLKNSLVR: 'twas purely for the lolz in reply to parent's:> I am sorry for my embarrassing lapse in judgment. :)But I do agree with the point you're making.
Sevii: Adsense is designed to have as many footguns as possible.
akoboldfrying: There certainly is a contradiction, but it's so deeply ingrained that using ad blockers is OK that people can't see it even when it's right in front of their faces.If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people.
technion: My experience deploying at blockers in the enterprise is the average non tech user feels the Internet is "broken" when it's not covered in ads and will tell helpdesk it needs to be fixed.
willio58: I was dumb enough when I was 11 to sign up for Adsense under my Mom’s name and put it on a php-based meme sharing site I made that my fellow 5th graders used.Anyway, I noticed I could make a couple dollars a week. So I had my friends sit there and spam load the site. Made about 80$ until Google banned me (my mom) for life from Adsense
freitasm: I joined AdSense in 2003. At peak it was generating US$15k a month.Nowadays it will be a miracle if it passes of US$800 a month.I think the shift to a more localised audience (NZ), diversion of ad spend to large social networks are responsible. Our traffic is similar in volume but nowhere near as "valuable" apparently.
fearless1ron: All ad networks are cancer, in my humble opinion. Adblocking is a security requirement, so I have no compassion for anybody who bases their economic success on any ad network.
fearless1ron: I'm sorry to say that I have to compassion at all for you. You deserve it for using an ad network like Google Ads (any ad network, honestly).
b00ty4breakfast: or at least an explanation. That would of course require a customer service apparatus designed to service customers rather than one designed to force them to become tangled in the abyssal morass.
quantummagic: Slightly off-topic, but several small-to-medium Youtube channels I watch, mentioned that their yearly Youtube earnings are way down, by two-thirds in one case. It may be that Alphabet is dialing back their profit sharing - across the board.
fearless1ron: Unfortunately not. Adblocking is a security requirement and should be enforced by any enterprise.
yapyap: at 20$ a click i’d click on my own adverts tbh
singpolyma3: Then you get banned
