Web Cash

I’ve been spending some time this week looking at new ways to monetize traffic – other advertising methods, new affiliate programs, etc. One thing I came across was Adfly. I’d seen it as a user before, but I’d never thought about using it…

Seemed simple enough. Shorten a URL, send people to it, make some cash on impressions.

This site and my other old blog both have a little bit of residual traffic that comes to them, despite the fact that I don’t really update them in any meaningful way. I figured if I added a few links to the end of each post (think related posts, with adfly links going to outside sources), I might be able to make a few bucks off those readers.

So I wrote up a short script, inserted it into both themes, and forgot about it for a few days. Today, I came back to look at something on the site and I noticed that all of my Adsense ads had changed to public service announcements (Big Brothers and Big Sisters, to be exact). The same thing had happened on both this domain and life-of-brian.com.

My other blog, the one that I still update and hadn’t put any Adfly links on, was still serving up regular Adsense ads. They’re all on the same Adsense account, too.

My guess, then, is that the crawler noticed the Adfly links and that flagged something in the system. Maybe there’s something in the Adsense ToS that I should have read before I tried this, oops. But keep in mind that if you try posting Adfly links on your legitimate Google AdSense website, you may jeopardize AdSense as a source of revenue. So you’d better make more money from those Adfly links than from the AdSense…