Just a warning for anyone who is considering upgrading to the new Admob, there seems to be a significant risk if you also have an Adsense account.
I never thought it would happen to me because I play by the rules, but today I noticed that I couldn’t access my Admob account anymore (apps.admob.com, interestingly the old Admob account still works), no ads were being served, and in my inbox there was an email that my Adsense account had been disabled.
So, back in the day I had a failed blog (< $200 lifetime Adsense income) that I now no longer update. It still get about 20 visitors a day and a couple of clicks per month. Now, the account ban email I received only references my Adsense account, but since Adsense and Admob are now linked, both accounts are affected.
The only reason for the ban that I can see is that Google doesn’t like “stale” and unoriginal blogs using Adsense. But it’s extremely harsh that this would now also affect my Admob account, with five figure downloads and an average user rating of 4.5? Maybe the Google fraud detection algorithm noticed the revenue on my joint account, but only looked at the Adsense impression and determined the clicks were invalid?
In any case, I advise against upgrading to the new Admob platform, it seems there are still some issues to iron out. At the very least, if you have any weird Adsense stuff going on, get it sorted out before upgrading.
I appealed, but I don’t have much hope. I’ll probably have to move to a different ad platform, though updating all the apps will be a pain. Until today, I held Google and Admob in highest regards. Now I’m just disappointed.