Adsense on free site with ad?

I have seen adsense on geocities sites? Is this OK?

[ControlEngineer]

I have come across a few Geocities (and other) free sites that have adsense running on them. Is this OK or a violation of TOS?

[kodaks]

I briefly skimmed through Adsense's TOS, and there is no section that states placing adsense ads on a free server is against the rules.

[shinyblue]

I would think they wouldn't have allowed it if they put it on their initial application. In 10/03 I first applied with a site that was subdomain of another site and they said they didn't allow that. I moved it to its own domain and they accepted it.

So maybe
a) are way laxer now about accepting sites.
b) these people applied with a regular domain site and then just added these later and haven't been found yet.
c) they have a free page but have a domain pointing at it and that was somehow OK.

[driris]

3 months back google accepted my application for adsense on free site

[muszek]

afair they had something about "ownership of the domain" in TOS

[Brett_Tabke]

Besides - Geocities is not necc free.

[anallawalla]

All recent WW threads on this subject seem to be anecdotal, so it is hard to tell when the restriction was lifted (seems > 3 months ago) - I cannot find anything in the ToS either. There are numerous quality sites built at free hosts that will benefit. Good move.

[Jenstar]

We had one member here who was told to remove AdSense from all Geocities pages unless he could prove he owned Yahoo, lol.

[webmasterworld.com...] - begins at msg #11

Geocities does offer hosting (Geocities Pro), so that wouldn't be a problem at all. But if you are placing AdSense on a URL that actually begins with www.geocities.com, that is where they have a problem.

At one time they were also running contextual Overture ads on free Geocities pages. If they still do this, it would be a violation of terms to run AdSense due to the "no competitor's contextual ads" clause.

[ControlEngineer]

All of my sites are paid, with no ads from anyone other than Google. I don't have any plans to use a free service; the Geocities (and other) no-ad services without your own domain (www.jashaw.com/yourname) are pretty cheap. I was thinking that Google didn't allow ads on the free (ad supported) sites, but I have seen such ads and don't see anything in the TOS. None of these were my competitors, however. ;-}

I am really just curious about what is allowed.

[Jenstar]

Some of the free hosts run AdSense on all sites, as a way to offset the costs. Many use them instead of popups and popunders. Both Netfirms and Tripod/Lycos run AdSense on the top of all free hosted sites.

So double-serving is an issue as well, since AdSense would already appear once on the page, courtesy of the host.