Booted off AdSense: Now what?

I have reflected a bit about what happened yesterday and what my options are.

First of all, this sucks on so many counts that I can barely list them.

For one thing, I was on my way to having all my hosting and bandwidth costs covered and maybe some money to go out for dinner once in a while. Not a big amount, but it hurts seeing it vanish.

But the worse part is the feeling of being lumped together with all those fraudulent publishers who are paying thousands of little indians to click on their ads. I’m somewhat afraid this is going to hurt me more than having my AdSense earnings disappear.

In any case, I’m not going to break down and cry. Quite the contrary, I’m now more determined than ever to make this blog popular and regain by other means what I have lost from Google.

The problem is that AdSense is a damnedly easy and effective way to raise some money for small publishers. A-list bloggers and highly trafficked websites can attract big advertisers, but for sites that only do a handful of visits per day, AdSense is the best option.

Anyway, assuming my account is not enabled again, I have a two or three affiliations that I haven’t really exploited until now, since I already had AdSense and didn’t want to clutter this site with ads. I’ll put them in place of AdSense banners, but I doubt they’ll pay me as much.

Incidentally, I haven’t modified my page templates yet, so AdSense blocks are still showing. I wonder what happens of clicks, now that my account is disabled. Will Google still charge advertisers? Are they going to withhold the publisher’s share or will they give it back to the advertisers?

I will explore the option of publishing my RSS feed via FeedBurner. Everybody’s saying that RSS is the next big thing, so I might as well try to monetize it.

I have also some hopes that Yahoo! might become a serious competitor to Google in this field. This might take a while, though. And who knows if they are going to accept an application from someone who has been dubbed a fraudulent clickster once?