I tried to log into my AdMob account this morning, and was presented with this message:
Your account has been disabled for invalid activity or repeated policy violations. Some examples include recurring manual clicks or impressions, violation of our content policies which can be found here, robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as pay-to-click, pay-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information here.
I obviously haven’t done anything that I thought was remotely against the AdMob Terms & Conditions. I’ve been using AdMob for years, and recently changed all my mediation to them. And now they’ve gone and killed my account - for reasons completely unknown to me.
I’m not at all impressed.
This could turn out to be a major problem, as practically all my revenue at the moment is running through AdMob. I’m not actually showing their ads directly, just using their mediation to trigger some Custom Events I wrote for LeadBolt, Tapjoy, AppBrain, SendDroid, etc. And also using House Ads to cross-promote some of my apps.
I’ve sent through an appeal - but based on my own & other peoples’ experience with Google’s developer support, I’m not overly hopeful of getting a decent chance at reinstatement.
So looks like I’ll be spending the next week updating all my apps to remove any trace of AdMob Any suggestions for what I should use instead? I’m planning on MoPub at this stage. They won’t be able to replace all the features (especially pre-loading custom ads) that I was using with AdMob. But at least they’re a smaller company who probably won’t randomly disable my account.
Ultimately I would really like to write my own mediation platform, but that won’t be happening any time soon. Just another warning - don’t put all your eggs in one basket! AdMob was the single point of failure for my revenue, and looks like they were also the weakest link.