How I almost lost my Adsense income forever

After June 1 2007, when Google is rumoured to be shutting down the Adsense accounts of arbitrage publishers, many will suddenly find their online income taps running dry or reduced to a trickle.

The thread on this topic in Webmasterworld has grown to 33 pages and is still going strong and frankly, I’m amazed at what I read! Some arbitrage publishers make up to 70K a month from Adsense. I’m assuming here that this refers to net profit. I know of regular publishers who make 10K to 30K without arbitrage, but 70K? Woooooweee! That’s more than most people make in a year and if you converted that to my country’s currency, that would be a quarter of a million a month! Four months and you’d be a millionaire!

That got me thinking… maybe I’m doing this ALL wrong. I’ve always advocated white hat techniques and I believe in building my websites FOR my visitors - to find a need and to fill that need - and look to long term growth. But heck, when you read about someone making 70K a month, it made me wonder…

I WAS approached by an Adsense arbitrageur friend of mine some months back who offered to fund an Adwords account and use my main website as the landing page. Why? He said my content was good and funding an Adwords account (for arbitrage) for a site already filled with good content would actually save him a lot of time. He actually did the math for me and my eyes popped out. I have to tell you, for two days and two nights, I SERIOUSLY considered his proposal. Even after giving him his cut of the profits, I would still make 10 times MORE than what I was getting at that time. After all, when you consider how things change in cyberspace, Google Adsense could very well be passe as quickly as it became the darling of every web publisher. So why shouldn’t I grab my share of the money pie quickly?

I turned down the offer. It wasn’t an easy decision, although now it looks like it was the right decision. If I had gone ahead and went into click arbitrage, I’d probably be one of those whose accounts will be disabled come June 1. Yeah, I would had made lots of money in those few months, but remember, Google is disabling “accounts” NOT “websites”. It isn’t clear yet whether these folks will be able to appeal for re-inclusion in the future, but Google has not been known to allow re-inclusion for anyone who has been banned.

This whole thing reminds me about an everyday example - You’re waiting patiently at the traffic light and along comes a hot-shot in his souped up hot-rod, thinks he owns the road, squeezes his way through to get to the front, then runs the red light. Yeah, he’s “cool” until the light turns green and you drive ahead to see him getting a traffic ticket from the cops. Sweet justice.

So, I came close to shooting myself in the foot. Soon I will tell you how I didn’t shoot myself in the foot, but how I did fall flat on my face!

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