Though I've never been banned, I know quite a few friends who have over the years. A couple of them deserved it (asking for clicks to support etc) but some of them not so much.
Like one guy getting banned because there was a thread talking about guns in his forum. His forum was definitely G-Rated, which is a requirement for adsense, but this one thread got him booted, and all his earnings yanked. Had they warned him (which they do more of now) he would have just deleted the thread but instead it was shut down with no appeal.
Stuff like that needs to be addressed more and looked at. After all what's the business sense in having LESS advertisers? I can see weeding out obvious offenders but as of now it seems they are a little to quick with the ban button.
Google does not provide a list of words, phrases, or topics to check for and filter out if you want to stay with AdSense. You just have to guess.
It's not fair for Google to keep the specifics surrounding their content enforcement rules on AdSense secret. The only time a publisher catches a glimpse of what those rules might actually be is when they are already on the verge of being banned for violating them.
This is Google we're talking about. Why can't Google have AdSense analyze the scraped data they already extract from your site on a daily basis, or inject a text content analyzer into the AdSense javascript payload 0.5% of the time to make those browsers report back with a locally-calculated percentage estimation as to whether that page should really be displaying ads at that particular moment, or anything else to programmatically detect that a given page is violating their secret rules, and then automatically disable ads on that page?
Does Google really expect every single one of their human publishers using AdSense on a site with user-generated content (such as articles with comment sections, link aggregator sites with submission queues, forums, interactive drawing boards, chat rooms, etc.) to hire extra hands to monitor all of that user-generated content 24/7, and to only manually whitelist ads on a per-page basis, and to stay forever vigilant and rush to disable the ads as soon as another comment has been posted which might now render the entire page inappropriate?
What I find most ridiculous of all and completely fail to understand is how Google will exert such strong pressure on publishers to censor user-generated content on websites utilizing AdSense, while simultaneously being perfectly happy with placing unskippable 15-second ads on nearly any given YouTube video, ranging from webcam rants containing no less than 20 F-bombs to things so disgusting that I'm concerned articulating them here even euphemistically will result in me being automatically banned from HN. Even if a video contains nothing foul, the comments underneath certainly will most of the time. If anyone tried that with AdSense, they'd be banned within days. How are AdSense publishers supposed to rely on their intuition regarding what they think Google will find acceptable, when the current state of YouTube clearly demonstrates that Google considers almost anything to be acceptable?
It scares me that Google does not have the common sense to treat small(?) publishers decently.
Given how I was treated over petty amounts on a website sideproject. Why would I use you guys as a payment processor or to sell software I had invested years in?
Though I've never been banned, I know quite a few friends who have over the years. A couple of them deserved it (asking for clicks to support etc) but some of them not so much.
Like one guy getting banned because there was a thread talking about guns in his forum. His forum was definitely G-Rated, which is a requirement for adsense, but this one thread got him booted, and all his earnings yanked. Had they warned him (which they do more of now) he would have just deleted the thread but instead it was shut down with no appeal.
Stuff like that needs to be addressed more and looked at. After all what's the business sense in having LESS advertisers? I can see weeding out obvious offenders but as of now it seems they are a little to quick with the ban button.