Important observation:

My ATF responsive ad is now consistently showing 300x250 banners which has increased CTR and RPM.

Earlier I would rarely see 300x250 ads ATF. Mostly a thin horizontal ad banner was displayed (probably 350x50)

So...Adsense permanently disabled my account as of May 20th (1 day before I was supposed to receive my payment). I've had no issues with them for almost 2 years until they randomly disabled my account for copyright reasons (they gave a broad description of what that could be, pictures etc). They're keeping the money I earned for April and May (over $5000). I'm honestly in disbelief. I won't be able to pay my bills for this month or the next few months from the looks from it and I live by myself and rent an apartment, no friends or family who live near me as I just moved 4 months ago. I'm in for some rough times... 😭😭

@Riley - Cheer up... repair the infractions and ask for a reconsideration. That's the way it works.

Long time reader, first time poster, because I find your comment really upsetting RileyX !

I've had no issues with them for almost 2 years until they randomly disabled my account for copyright reasons (they gave a broad description of what that could be, pictures etc).

How do you call repeated copyright violations, if these are not issues? It sounds that Adsense was really nice to give you several chances, but what did you do? You continued to infringe copyright, what did you expect? And now you come whining about it?

They're keeping the money I earned for April and May (over $5000).

That you earned? By stealing others' work?

I won't be able to pay my bills for this month or the next few months from the looks from it

So your idea was to make a living by stealing copyrighted material all along your life? Consider yourself lucky, people from whom you stole their work, should sue you, and get you to jail.

and I live by myself and rent an apartment, no friends or family who live near me as I just moved 4 months ago. I'm in for some rough times...

So imagine people who are homeless, or living in countries at war... whereas in their case, this is absolutely not their fault.

[edited by: QuaterPan at 9:13 am (utc) on May 21, 2018]

@RileyX Aha.... Get Google AdX, no hard rules and you'll be never banned.

Hello QuaterPan and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Thank you Keyplyr

I started earning better than previous months!

@QuarterPan

Would you like me to pass you a tissue? Come on man, give the guy a break, anybody would be upset if this happened to them. This is your fir post and this is the kind of response somebody gets from you, a good way to make friends.

First of all; not man.

anybody would be upset if this happened to them

Oh? Upset about what? That you can't make money from the work of others? So for you, stealing content from others to make profits, getting caught several times, and continuing is something fine, and needs to be supported? May be this is your business model too.

So, all my apologizes to RileyX, yes, Adsense is evil, you should sue them for having banned you. Mean while, like MayankParmar recommends, you'll certainly find other ad networks which will be fine with financing repeating robber.

I too have no sympathy for thieves, if that is in fact the case here.

I spend a lot of time chasing down content thieves and writing C&D's. I've been accused of being overly ruthless because I go for the throat and forcefully complain to all the upstream providers, often getting entire sites taken down.

Adsense site are especially prone to theiving. Steal someone's content or images and slapping ads all around. Copy to numerous cheap domains and as one gets closed, launch another.

I deal with this constantly and it's a lot of my valuable time I could have spent other ways.

@Quarter pan

My apologies Mme :-)

If you are expecting a four-figure amount of money to arrive in your bank account and it doesn't then, of course, you are going to be extremely upset. You've tried and convicted him without really knowing any of the details of what happened. I don't know how long you've been with AdSense but I've been with them for a long time and I know for sure they can be extremely pedantic and will threaten you will violation issues for the most stupid reasons. They threaten to close me down a few years ago because somebody had posted a photograph on my forum showing a woman's thong, absolutely ridiculous when you think about the sort of adverts they often show.

Although I would agree with you about not relying on AdSense for income you could have put it a little more politely. I doubt whether somebody would go to jail for using somebody else's photo on their website without permission, that's called scaremongering.

"The AdSense Terms and Conditions have been updated. Please accept the new terms in order to continue using AdSense."

Just received.

My ATF ads also went full sized last week (300x250). Had to hardcode a height into the CSS to prevent this as I think this looks desperate despite the bump in stats.

Never had been an issue until last week.

QuaterPan, how do you know that RileyX had several chances? He says he had no issues til now. And no, I am not defending his actions.

AdSense told me that there's a significant number of ad requests from URLs that are not yet crawled, that's why I am noticing a massive drop in AdSense revenue. They are investigating.

Everytime someone mentions any issue here, I check Notifications, Policy Center and Crawler Errors only to find that everything is working fine :)

@MayankParmar can you explain ,,Get Google AdX, no hard rules and you'll be never banned." in detail? I heard that once user get banned from AdSense, he stil receive previous month revenue etc... But I never found how/why to use AdX instead of AdSense directly. Thanks for clarification.

@Blazinec My point is that Google don't ban AdX for small mistakes (placement etc), but AdSense does.

@MayankParmar that is true, however to be under AdX, you need to be approved by additional level partners, correct? Do you know the fastest way to go under AdX?

@Blazinec It's quite easy. Just Google/Bing Google AdX and signup for any certified partner (Monetize More, ExMarketPlace, AdPushup). Quick approval.

@QuaterPan That was incredibly disrespectful. My content is 100% authentic and original. I have a hip hop news website where we post info on new music, upcoming artists and other music related news. The only copyright I could imagine that were infringed would be the actual album covers which are generally "fair use". You see them all the time major news websites like forbes, pitchfork etc. We do post links with Apple Music, Soundcloud and Spotify players, I didn't think that would ever be in violation of copyright or Adsense terms of service. Why would Apple Music, Soundcloud and Spotify make these preview players available if they were in violation of copyright? Anyway an update to my situation after having my Adsense account disabled last night, my bank account is officially negative and will be maxed out on overdraft within the next day or two. I've got maybe a weeks worth of food left in my kitchen...it was hard to get up this morning..I've never been so stressed before I honestly feel sick to my stomach..don't know what to do at this point. I'm scrambling to apply for other advertising networks but haven't heard anything yet. Won't get any kind of payment for atleast a month or two anyway..god help me...

[edited by: RileyX at 8:01 pm (utc) on May 21, 2018]

@blazinec Thanks for the google Adx suggestion. I previously applied but didn't meet their requirements for my own individual account despite having roughly 700k uniques/month. I was actually just talking to Patrick Cines at google maybe a month ago about exploring partner options. Ill definitely look into this asap. Thanks

[edited by: RileyX at 8:03 pm (utc) on May 21, 2018]

@RileyX, I doubt Google itself will accept you for Adx, the traffic requirement for it direct is even higher compared to third party partners. You are maybe looking at 100 million+ monthly impressions to even have someone talking to you *seriously (other than the initial question connection). So don't count on it at all.

Music industry is tough on copyright stuff and it's a well protected garden, hell they'll even charge tons of money to simply have lyrics on there. Your story isn't new, it has happened many many times in the past. Music industry is one that I would not touch without proper connections to the agencies that protect and charge money for its properties.

In this part...google is the judge jury and executioner. You can't do much about it and I doubt that you could reverse the decision unless you change your content significantly.

The long game, I would personally spend more time to bring more complimentary content along with the preview players. I don't know how it could be done. But I think it's a issue of ratio. 90% unique content vs 10% preview player maybe. The key is to focus on sell the original content, with "previews" as supplement. Does that make sense? I don't know your site, but perhaps you put too much focus on the preview part and try to monetize based on that content alone.

A simple news release: check out this new albums. Slap on a bunch of preview players to the songs. Is probably not going to work. And the copyright complaint may be valid. But if you focus on the history, and analyze every part of the song bits, and make long ass articles about why and how the artist made the song. And at the end add a tidbit of "check this preview out". That may work, but even then there is a ton of risk. It's about focus, and hope that the judge / jury (google) / and music industry lawyers do not come after you.

But this is not a short term fix. I feel you. Good luck and hope things work for at the end for you. It's stories like yours that reminds us to always have a big margin of safety in the industry.

In terms of adsense...I am seeing an RPM uplift as the month gets towards the end. Working 12 hour days to optimize stuff as well as generating content...life's tough.

Everything is now back to normal on my site. I'm getting 2009 numbers if you know what i mean :)
CPC great, CTR great, everything is just on point.

We had this discussion about embedded music players and copyright before, when someone got hit up for having an embedded song on one page. If your whole site is based on that model, I'd say you're in trouble.

@Mayank, May I know the minimum requirements for applying Google Adx ? My website is getting around 25,000 visits a day and it's mostly mobile traffic from US / UK.

@sudarshanms AFAIK, you can be approved with any amount of traffic.

@Mayank so you just apply for AdX directly and get approved?

@blazinec Via a partner :) Direct approval is not at all easy, for that you need millions of impressions a day.