AdSense Isn't for Everyone

There's a short article in eWeek about an AdSense customer suing Google. It's articles like this that inspire things like the Darwin Awards (although no one actually died this time).

In summary, this person, Theresa Bradley, has filed a $250,000 lawsuit against Google for having spent 100 hours implementing Google AdSense on her site only to later have her AdSense account disabled by Google. First of all, this 100 hours of time spent is ludicrous. The site in question has under 30 pages which would mean 3 hours of coding for each page. Way too much time even if every page is hand-coded.

The exaggerated work effort is just the beginning. Apparently Theresa got her account terminated because she was clicking on each ad that appeared on her site to make sure the advertisers weren't selling competing products and services. Apparently she missed the item in Google's Terms and Conditions that clearly forbids publishers from clicking on ads on sites that they own.

So are we looking at a publicity stunt here? Or is this really clever linkbait? The former worked in my case as I did check out the site. But there's no link from me to help her cause. I'm even putting a nofollow on the link to eWeek just to keep the indirect link from me from helping her.

On a somewhat related note, Alexis Garrett, the owner of a company named AdSense, has given up. Apparently she's been using the name AdSense for many years even before Google started their advertising program. But because of Google's popularity, people have been contacting Alexis and AdSense.com seeking technical support. Alexi's solution to this problem? Sell the AdSense.com and change her company's identity… errrr… sort of. Her company now lives at AdSense2.com. You'd think that a marketing company like AdSense.com would be able to figure out a way to monetize on this confusion, wouldn't you?