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Absolutely :D Initially we had AdSense on the page itself, kickassapp.com. A banner on the startpage and some sub-pages. This went well, we made maybe 100 USD
by erikrothoff 10y ago
Absolutely :D
Initially we had AdSense on the page itself, kickassapp.com. A banner on the startpage and some sub-pages. This went well, we made maybe 100 USD a month on the traffic we got. Then one day I decided to add ads within the game. (The menu you see is an iframe to our site. So it is on our domain)
It being a bookmarklet you can play it on any page. This worked fairly well and we didn't get warnings for a while. Then when people decided to shoot up porn sites we got a warning saying you are not allowed to show ads on explicit content. I did nothing and the warning went away, presumably because nobody played on a porn site again for a while. Then we got another warning when this happened. After that I decided to remove the in-game ads because it wasn't worth the trouble.
I thought that would solve the issue. I'm not sure if we were under the microscope after that or it's just something that AdSense is fairly strict towards but: We have a highscore list on the front page that links to pages people played on. This was not filtered, so if someone played on a porn site (or torrent site) we would then have an outbound link towards explicit content. This we got a warning for. I kinda panicked and removed the links on the highscore widget on the frontpage. (The warning did say something to the tune of "You have outbound links to banned content"). However I totally forgot that we also list on the profile page of a player the sites they play on. So we had outbound links there as well to explicit content. Before I realized that we got a permanent ban from AdSense saying that we did not listen to their warnings.
The appeal process has so far not gotten us in touch with a human to explain that we do never intend to this again and that we're sorry and super willing to fix any issues. I assume we're not worth the trouble :) Also I think "ass" in the name is hinder here :)
Us putting ads when playing on other pages was a bad decision on our end I agree. The outbound links were dubious in my opinion since we have a lot of user generated content and policing that was just hard. I'm not sure if putting a "rel=nofollow" would be better... Never did get an answer to that one.
In terms of other ad networks we tried I can just say it's a shady world.