Blog Comments and AdSense

Today's post isn't one I planned to write, in fact, I had planned to update some older posts to reflect some of the recent changes in AdSense, but after finding this comment (you'll see it later in the post) waiting to be published, I realized that it might be wise to remind publishers that the comments they allow to be posted on their blogs matter.

You see, with AdSense, everything on your site matters. Whether it's your written contents, or images and videos, or even the comments your visitors leave. Visitor comments are considered "user generated content" and as publishers, we are responsible for contents generated by users of our sites.

What that means is that as a publisher, if you are using AdSense on your site, then you need to monitor and review all comments that are posted on your articles. Because even those comments can get ad serving disabled on your site.

I Can't Login to Adsense!

...or, as people often say "why can't I login to adsense!!!!!!!!!!!!" (note: nobody needs that many exclamation points, and yes, I know you are probably frustrated, but exclamation points aren't going to help. Staying calm and taking action will.)

Today I'm just going to address one of the most common reasons we see for this problem. And it's simple, although it isn't always simple to solve. In fact, often, it might not even get resolved.

I didn't bother counting because these types of posts in the AdSense forum are very prolific:

And yes, deleting the email account you used to sign up for AdSense with will cause you not to be able to login to Adsense.  It's the way you get into your account.

Easy Adsense Approval Through YouTube!

Aha ... gotcha!

So, is it true? Actually, it is true. Getting your AdSense account approved for your YouTube channel is not a difficult process, and applying through your Channel's monetization tab will most likely result in your account being approved within hours, or a day.

Obviously you need to meet the minimum requirements:

• must be 18 years of age or older to apply for Adsense
• should have some monetizable content on your channel (even one video)
• cannot have had a previously disabled Adsense account
• your monetization tab must be enabled by YouTube

If you meet those requirements, the chances are that your AdSense application for monetizing your channel will be approved.

Yay, right? Well, maybe not.

Buy An AdSense Website

Actually, you shouldn't buy a website for AdSense. At least, you shouldn't be buying one that was made for the sole purpose of putting ads on. Those types of sites are created by sellers just for placing ads on them, and they're considered by AdSense to be "MFA" sites. That means "Made for Advertising" and AdSense has no interest in monetizing sites like that.

There was a time that sites of that nature prospered with AdSense and other online advertising, but AdWords advertisers are no longer interested in paying to have their ads displayed on sites whose contents just don't provide any value to visitors. No value for visitors, usually results in providing no value to the advertiser as well. So more than a few years back, AdSense stopped accepting MFA sites, and started disabling ad serving to MFA sites.

Most likely, you'll still find some of them around, but many of them (particularly newer ones) don't last very long with AdSense. Publishers who work hard at creating original, and useful content really don't want to compete with MFA sites either, so good publishers will report them when they find them, and on their own, AdSense continues to review every publisher's websites that carry AdSense ads, so if you end up buying an MFA site and add it to your AdSense account, you may find that ads won't stay on the site for very long.

Adsense, Copyright, and Fair Use

Are Google Images Free to Use?

Google Images are not images owned by Google, so they give no permission for the use of images shown on Google Images.  Google images is nothing more than a search engine that indexes images that can be found on the web.

That does not mean you have permission to use them. Every image is protected by copyright unless it's listed in the Public Domain (must say so); or unless it's licensed as Creative Commons (in which case you must follow the licensing terms) or, unless the copyright holder (ie: the owner of the image - the artist, the photographer, the creator) has listed it as free to use.  The same would hold true for any image search engine (like yahoo or bing) - since they do not own the images, they cannot grant you usage rights for the images. The only one who can give you authorization to use the images is the owner/creator of the image.

And there are, in fact, quite number of websites that offer free images for bloggers and website owners, incuding some of the more popular micro-stock sites (Shutterstock to name at least one). They require you to sign up and you are restricted to certain uses and to the images they offer weekly/daily for free, but they are images produced by professional photographers. There really is no excuse for using images without permission when many sites offer them for free. Even Flickr has a multitude of images licensed for use under Creative Commons. You just have to read the appropriate licenses and follow them.