MMSTL - Too Much for Google

In the middle of the year 2003, the search engine "heavy", Google, launched a new feature entitled "Google Adsense" that was promoted as 'allowing website owners an opportunity to generate revenue from their websites'. The way it worked was that Google would attract advertisers to place ads on website pages via a small piece of programming code. Website owners could sign up for Adsense, and when the ads appeared on a site's web pages, Google and the website owners each would earn income from the advertisers every time a web visitor clicked on an ad, and thus the action was known as "Cost Per Click". On high traffic websites, such as ESPN, the cost per click for popular advertisers could range from $1.00 to several dollars per click, while other websites that serviced smaller audiences, such as the MMSTL, would have a cost per click rate ranging from a penny to perhaps 15 or 20 cents.

Even though I didn't like the idea of littering web pages with ads, I felt it was a means of making money for the MMSTL prize fund (and not for my own personal gain). It was a short time after this new feature's launch when I implemented Adsense on the MMSTL site, and after about 4 to 6 months, I received a check in the mail from Google for $100.00. After a similar timeframe, I received another $100.00 check, and finally, a third check came along in a little less time. The money wasn't big, but it was at least something to pad the prize fund. After the 3rd check, shortly thereafter, I received an email from Google stating that the MMSTL account was suspended, due to too many pages with ads being generated. This didn't make a lot of sense, since nothing had changed with the way the ads were being placed on the pages for over a year, and there was never a warning given, nor any proviso existing in the Adsense policies. It wasn't a big deal, however, since it wasn't a lof of revenue, although with the amount of time between checks being shorter by the 3rd 'residuals check', there were obviously more people viewing the site's web pages.

The likely cause for this permanent suspension was presumably the result of one of two scenarios: 1) Either the techs hired by Google who were responsible for monitoring 'illegal click activity' were overwhelmed by having to inspect over 200 pages for one website per week (for 38 weeks at a time), or 2) Google's automated algorithms reached a limit on the number of pages accumulated by one website, and this subsequently broke its system. So either way, the reality of the situation was that the MMSTL was too much for Google to handle. I would surmise that if it was a case of automated algorithms getting exhausted on the Google end, it would be because whoever initially programmed limitations on Adsense accounts set a maximum of perhaps 10,000 pages of overall updates, or something similar. They obviously didn't anticipate a website with so many pages of fresh content (with new ads) to be uploaded on a weekly basis.