[nivla]

I use adsense and let me say sadly there isn't a better alternative to it, its simply the best paying ad network out there. However it is also the only business related service that puts me into constant state of stress.

Here is my comment reposted from an early discussion regarding the adsense that got flagged off the frontpage[1]:

I am not sure about the claims made on the post but there was something else that caught my eye a while back. I registered for Adsense when starting a side-project. I tried my best to follow all the requirements such as only 3 block of ads per page, no self clicking even if the ad was relevant to you etc. Since it was relatively new, it din't have much traffic. Then it started booming but it wasn't predictable by any manner, one day it would get featured on Reddit and then the traffic dies down, the next week it will another wave because it got featured in some popular blog, so on. However, despite the traffic being not predictable, the percentage of invalid clicks judged by Google remained the same. i.e. say your account shows up the earnings as $1200 but the check gets issued to you for around $1175, next month if you made $1500, your check will be for $1468. The reason Google claimed for this difference was the final audit that looks for invalid clicks right before a check gets issued. I thought it was crazy that I could easily predict what I would be actually getting instead of what is shown to be earned, moreover my super ability to predict invalid clicks. So I decided to keep a log of the difference for ~ a year, and what do you know, the difference in final audit was almost always the same percentage despite huge variations in traffic. I am happy to post the log but I will be breaking one of the adsense rules of revealing your earnings and thus risk losing my account. Anyways I am not bothered by it anymore, I just learned to write off the difference as expense and/or consider it as "protection money" that needs to paid. Too bad there aren't any good alternatives. Adsense is by far the best paying ad-network but if it had less shady tactics and better support I would have definitely put it on my recommendation list.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976