AdSense Account Cancelled!

UPDATE: According to staff, yes, this is real. Please see this thread in the forum.


Just a quick note to let you know that we seem to be flooded in the forums with publishers that have
received a notice saying their AdSense account was cancelled and they'll receive their payment in the next payment cycle.

Is this for real? At the moment, we aren't sure what's happening. There are differences in some of the notifications and some of the situations.

• Some publishers are still able to login to their AdSense accounts and have no problems within the account.
• Some publishers are unable to login to their accounts at all.
• Some people are not AdSense publishers and have never had an AdSense account, nor signed up for one.

Because this a holiday week in the US, it may take a little while before we have a response from staff. There is an ongoing thread in the forum for publishers to post in if they have received one of these notices (please don't start a new thread - use the open one instead). If you post in the thread please include the following information:

The Mystery of AdSense Smart Pricing

Lots of AdSense publishers have probably heard the term "smart pricing", but how many know exactly what it is, or how it's applied to AdSense earnings?  I suppose not very many - me included.  While AdSense provides some information and insight into smart pricing on the publisher side of things, they certainly don't spell out the exact details of how it works, nor are they ever likely to.

Is it applied to entire publisher's account? To all their websites? To all their traffic?

When you look at AdSense's basic explanation to publishers and then look at how they explain smart pricing to the advertiser, there is a very slight difference in those explanations, but that difference can help you form your own opinions on how it might work.

AdSense Publisher

"Google’s smart pricing feature is designed to raise advertiser confidence in the AdSense network, which in turn can lead to higher bids on ads that appear on publisher sites. This then benefits the entire advertising ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and users in the long run."

YouTube Payments with AdSense

For many new YouTube partners monetizing their channels with AdSense, the payment system can be a little confusing. Even if you've been earning with a website or blog, you may be confused by how the payments work from YouTube because to many's surprise, the way you track estimated earnings is markedly different than when using a website or blog. And the timing for finalized (or verified as payable) earnings is different too, making the process a little more difficult to understand.

Included in the confusion is the fact that YouTube will allow you to monetize your videos, even before you have an approved Adsense account (and before you apply!).  At least they used to and I'm not sure if it's still the same. For some unlucky publishers, this fact only becomes clear when they appear in the AdSense help forum wondering how to get their money from YouTube.

What isn't clear is that you need to link to an approved AdSense account in order to collect payments, but even worse ... AdSense will NOT pay you for any of the monetization that occurred before you linked your channel to an approved AdSense account. Once you do link your channel, AdSense only picks up the earnings from that point forward, and those would be the earnings that eventually get transferred to AdSense.

NOTE: At one time, the help center on YouTube used to offer this bonus information, but it no longer does, so I'll be honest and say that as of now, I don't know if they still do offer the bonus or not.

Help - I Can't Login to Adsense!

There seems to be a lot more issues lately with people who aren't able to login to their AdSense accounts, and for some the issue is confusing, and difficult to troubleshoot.

There can be a number of reasons why an individual "suddenly" might not be able to access their old, often-used AdSense account.

1. a change in the email address
2. forgot user (email) name or password
3. using and having an adblocker or security plugin/extension turned on
4. antivirus privacy/security browser helpers
5. account disabled (in which case you'd see a notice)
6. account hacked
7. using the wrong Google Account to login with (*see note below)

Quite possibly there are other reasons, but these are the ones we've run across pretty frequently. The first thing to check is your browser and computer settings.

Lower Revenues Plague Publishers

A lot of publishers have noticed some major changes in their Adsense earnings since the beginning of 2016. Some of you might be surprised to know that "dropping revenues" aren't new. Anyone that has been with AdSense for more than a couple of years will already know that revenues continue drop on a CPC basis.

Back when AdSense first became a popular product (AdSense's beginnings go back to 2003) it was easier to earn enough every month to not only make a living doing it, but to toss up a website in a day or two and build your site portfolio. Earnings topping thousands of dollars every month per website were not that tough to acquire if you had a computer and internet access. The number of websites were much smaller than the number today, but so were the number of people using the internet much lower.

Over the years, marketing changes have made it a lot harder. As publishers, we like to think that AdSense "has our back", but the fact is that a lot of changes made in AdSense's products are usually precipitated by advertiser satisfaction, rather than by publisher's demands. And because advertisers can now place ads for much less expense, and there are many more publishers and monetizable platforms, the earnings are driven downwards on a CPC basis.

In everyday terms, it's representative of the supply and demand theory. When you have a lot of something (in this case publishers), and less demand for that something (not as many advertisers), the cost (in this case CPC) should go down. But supply and demand is not quite as simple as that. Even if you have a lot of publishers/websites, if you also have a lot of advertisers, the cost should remain relatively stable.