In today’s edition of live by the Google, die by the Google, I bring you the story on Henry and Wilson, 25 year old awakened twins from Baltimore. Henry and Wilson wanted to become rich and set out to make their online fortune by building a huge Internet empire. The only problem was, all their online income came from Google AdSense.
Rich Twin To Poor Twin
Henry and Wilson didn’t seem to mind that 100% of their lifestyle was being supplied by one company. After all, the checks never bounced. They were indeed living by the Google, and they were living it up to the tune of six figure monthly AdSense income. It’s the stuff of Internet dreams and the twins documented their journey on their blog, Rich Twin Poor Twin. That journey crashed last month – just a few days short of Google sending them another check – when Google banned the twins and kicked them off their money train. Total lose was around $200,000.
I don’t even have the words to describe the frustration we are going through right now. The total loss is around $200,000 or something but we don’t have an exact amount because we can’t log into any of our AdSense accounts. With server fees and programmer fees still bleeding us right now as I type. It’s quite depressing and the only reason why I decided to blog about this crap is because I read John’s post a few days ago.
I feel really cheated with the payments pending to arrive in days when we got the ban emails for invalid clicks. Google does not pay publishers even for the previous month’s earnings if you get banned. There was no warning and it never entered my head that I could lose all of our AdSense accounts.
We Never Thought This Would Happen To Us
We hear about publishers getting banned from AdSense all the time. We just never think it will happen to us. But what if it does? A banning of this size is extremely rare. I only know of one other six figure banning. This goes to show that no matter how big you maybe with AdSense, you can still get banned. And if all your revenue comes from Google, then you just screwed yourself.
Never let Google be your sole source of income or traffic. Making money online is all about maximizing income and traffic from multiple sources. Google has me in their search engine dog house right now. Has it affected my traffic? See the RSS counter on the upper right? It’s displaying a new record high. 😈