freejung - 12:02 am on Jan 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

I think Brett has a point here. Simply stating that you make money from Adsense, just as a statement of fact, should not constitute encouraging clicks. That is simply stating, without bias, a fact that anyone could easily discover by reading Google's own marketing material regarding Adsense. Accurately stating facts that are already public knowledge is a TOS violation? That seems pretty unreasonable.

Having said that, I bet we're not getting the whole story here. It seems unlikely to me that stating that he made money from Adsense was the real reason his account was banned and not reinstated. Google didn't state _why_ the account was banned, we have no way of knowing if it was related to the disclosure of earnings at all.

My guess is that at some point he did actually request that his subscribers click on the ads, and he is either neglecting to mention that or doesn't realize that's what he was doing. The offense was probably not in the mere disclosure of fact, but somewhere in the background of this statement:

As part of the deal, and as a way of involving the sailors, I tell them about the revenue for the project which all comes from the website. The more the website earns the more sailing I can do, the more films they see.

That in combination with saying he makes money from clicks probably does constitute encouraging clicks.

Ultimately this could be a loss for Google, though, as his content seems to have potential.