Is Adsense Revenue Sharing Allowed?

[qllonceagain]

Several forums are offering sharing the ad money. Basically, if you have an adsense ad and you post, the forum owner will display his adsense code 50% and the post's ID will be used 50% of the time.

Is that allowed? I have seen on TOS, it says the publisher must have the authority to display the ad and the content.

[diamondgrl]

I don't see why not but it's a really profoundly idiotic way to do business. Would YOU want your entire adsense account jeopardized by hordes of people who may have lower ethics than you and may think nothing of mindlessly clicking on your ads which will then get both of you banned?

[qllonceagain]

If somebody fraudly click my Adsense, I will be banned? Why not the clicker? I have no control who is clicking. I did not ask them to click.

[diamondgrl]

No, you won't necessarily be banned if someone else clicks. But you could be. The whole point is how does Google know which one of you two business partners - you or your forum owner - paid the ad clicker? Sure you could appeal and say it wasn't you and maybe you can convince Google of that, but would you want to be in that position?

It's just an inherently unstable business relationship, both from your perspective and particularly from the forum owner, to have a situation where any unethical person can sign up with no possible ethical screen and then be incentivized to game the system.

[Hugene]

If somebody fraudly click my Adsense, I will be banned? Why not the clicker? I have no control who is clicking. I did not ask them to click.

if it was as your suggesting, then I'll just get all my friends to constantly click the ads and I'll become rich.

There obviously must be some way of protecting adsense from faud, and the easiest one is to penailze the publisher. How do you want to penalize the adclicker? Its much harder, if not almost impossible.

[Never_again]

If somebody fraudly click my Adsense, I will be banned?

If Google determines that fraudulent clicking is occurring on your Adsense code regardless of who or what has caused it, you have a VERY high likelihood of having your Adsense account closed by Google – and without warning. You will find a number of posts on this forum from people who have had this happen.

IMHO, it would be foolish to allow your code to be placed on another site not under your direct control.

[qllonceagain]

I already have a solution for this:

I will only allow 20 views from the same IP, and no more than 5 clicks from the same IP. That way, nobody can fraud me or google even he/she wants to.

I can use a counter to track the viewing and and use tracker to track the click.

[diamondgrl]

So presumably, qllonceagain, you are thinking of starting your own such forum? Since you seem to have control over it, right? I was just assuming you were thinking of being a member of the forum.

Unless I'm missing something, I wouldn't include a page view limit. In fact, that's downright rude to the user and you're not going to attract any loyal users. It's only excessive clicks that Google will penalize.

And is your click maximum a per day limit or permanent? I would say that's still asking for big trouble if a person can click 5 times a day.

[qllonceagain]

I am not starting a forum, but rather a Guestbook/WWWboard type things, because WWWBOARD is all HTML thing, no PHP, no database.

I hope I can find a way to prevent cheaters, because it will bring me trouble. I am afraid of automatic clicking software or somebody blind keeps clicking at the same spot.

Do you think set up as 5 views per page per day is good? And maybe 5 clicks per day per site and 10 clicks per week?

I also need to block all anounymouse proxy visitors, as AOL, Rogers proxeis all show the original IP address. The rest proxies are cheater's friends.

[jonathanleger]

1) You have no control over who clicks on the AdSense ads regardless of whether it's on a forum site or your own site, so I don't find that a valid argument personally.

2) I've seen forums doing this, too, but it does appear to be against the TOS.

[qllonceagain]

here is what one forum says:

Is this allowed by Google?
I have gone over the AdSense terms and conditions a few times (both the Overview and the legal version), and I'm not able to find anything to suggest that it's not allowed. But if you know (or believe) otherwise, I would like to hear from you.

i am still new here, so i don't know if i am allowed to post URL here, but the forum was ranked PR7 and top 10 seo forum.

[diamondgrl]

I was not clearly thinking in my latest reply. How do you determine if someone has clicked on an AdSense ad?

Sure, you can decide whether or not to display the ad based on whether you have logged x number of page views from that IP address that day, but you have no idea how to know if they have clicked, do you?

I suppose you could assume that most users who visit a few pages are there to stay and are not likely to click on an ad and that most of the ad-clickers will be folks who accidentally got to the site and want to leave.

In any case, I think you are playing with fire and you should think through implications very carefully.

[qllonceagain]

To prevent fraud clicks, you can use the Adsense tracker to track who clicked what from what IP at when.

[howiejs]

I asked this question earlier in the summer - I have also seen this biz model. I have not heard a comment from google on this directly

BUT - TOS states that you can't place the code on sites that you don't own - or have permission for? so does this relationship w/ the forum give you "permission?

[dk7012]

It means you have permission. That's because it was the webmaster's idea, so he is permitting you to display adsense ads.

[div01]

Your Adsense code is not a secret, it is published on every page that shows Adsense ads. So it could easily end up on sites/domains you do not own. And if this was a known way to get publisher into trouble with Google, you'd have a flurry of unethical webmasters doing it. A simple fix would be for Google to grandfather existing customers and their sites as officially allowed in and then manually review any other new website that want to use the program.