StumbleUpon & Adsense not a good mix?

For ~~bloggers~~ Adsense Publishers who’ve realized the traffic gold-mine in StumbleUpon, it might not be a good mix for you. A thread over at DP (via SEORoundTable) mentions StumbleUpon as a possible auto-traffic program by Google:

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites. Please bear in mind that if we continue to detect invalid clicks or impressions from these services on your ads, we may disable your account to protect our advertisers etc…..

Though there’s no definite answer to this issue yet, I believe that this could be a possible reason for an Adsense Publisher to get his account banned (not because there was a surge in traffic but because of the surge in ad clicks caused by that traffic.) This could also be riskier if majority of your site’s traffic are not organic but inflated because of social sites like StumbleUpon, Digg or del.icio.us. Best thing to do is always inform an Adsense Rep when it happens.

P.S.
Actually, when I first saw StumbleUpon a couple years ago, I had the first impression that it was just another traffic exchange program.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

15 Comments

the kir says:

12 years ago

If you want to make money from your stumbleupon traffic and you have your adsense account banned then read that article: http://www.squidoo.com/make-money-from-your-social-bookmarking-traffic-in-2-easy-steps
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Rabindra Lamsal says:

13 years ago

But I don’t think that traffic from social sites like Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon etc may banned our adsense account.
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Christian Esperar says:

13 years ago

I just learned the value of stumbled upon and began to amaze on how stumbled upon drive traffic to my site.
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Terrence Taitt says:

15 years ago

I will be using stumble upon pretty soon, and I hope it works out for me…
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Umair Wasi says:

15 years ago

Very nice message over impression/click fraud, I like it, but main thing that i observed during all my campaigning practice is that if number of impressions are coming from only one source then google might think that the publisher is involved in click/impression fraud, if we have more than one source then I think we are not in trouble, I am using SU side by side with craigslists.org both are giving me nice impressions but I use craigslist smore than SU because I thought that there is something wrong with SU and I dont want to take the risk of my adsense account.
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karim says:

17 years ago

very useful article for me.
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Jonathan says:

18 years ago

Stumbleupon should not be considered a nefarious auto-surfer. It is more like a search engine. I use SU regularly. I type the search term in the Stumbleupon search bar and hit enter. It takes me to a site that other SU members have submitted and voted on. It is not as specific for terms as the main search engines, but it does have some very good sites that I would probably not discover through the main search engines.

It is fairly spam resistant – when it gives me a site that is just another crap-selling page, I vote thumbs-down. And so do other people. SU values quality content, as assessed by its users, not some algorithm.
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Nick says:

18 years ago

Hey everyone, I just wanted to greet my online friends and fellow bloggers a warm and heartfelt Valentine’s Day Greeting…

I hope everyone had a wonderful day filled with LOVE (I wish this for you on every other day as well)
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ade says:

18 years ago

An old article was once submitted to Stumbleupon once, but since my blog was new back then, the traffic and ad clicks didn’t really change anything.
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Denis The SQL Menace says:

18 years ago

Why don’t you switch to adbrite? http://www.adbrite.com/mb/?spid=3061
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jhay says:

18 years ago

I’ve never really used StumbleUpon and I’m not sure if my blog has been StumbleUponed by anyone.

Still, this issue is something to watch out for.
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Sasha Manuel says:

18 years ago

I’m a stumbler. I’ve been stumbling since 2006. There have been issues raised particularly on one’s site not earning through Adsense if viewed via Stumble Upon. I haven’t had problems with it though. Is it still considered “automated surfing” when there are actual people using an app designed to help you surf faster lang?

Stumble Upon is also considered a social networking app e.
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pinoymoneytalk says:

18 years ago

My experience about this:

http://www.pinoymoneytalk.com/2007/01/10/stumbleupon-and-adsense/

It’s really hard to second-guess Google as to what is allowed and not. I received an email warning before about invalid clicks and impressions but I’m not sure if I can attribute this to SU because I’ve been using SU for several months already before I got the mail. Thousand other SU users seem to be not reporting any warning from Google either.
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marhgil says:

18 years ago

Natakot tuloy ako. My textmates blog has been added to StumbleUpon just recently and traffic almost doubled overnight. Haven’t received any warning from Google, pero nag-email na rin ako sa kanila to clear things up.
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Euri says:

18 years ago

I just got my Adsense account banned a month ago. I didn’t know why but Google said that it’s because they detected an invalid click. I tried e-mailing Google but they said that it was indeed an invalid impression. :( Although I really doubt that I get that too much clicks.
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