What is an AdSense Jail?: Every found yourself in one? I know I have!
[EDIT] Let me explain a little. For those of you that advertise on your blogs, have you ever gotten into the situation where one fine morning your blog starts to generate a substantially large sum of revenue because of something you wrote (I mean substantial, really) and then you update your blog and the revenue dissappears as suddenly as it appeared? Once this happens to you more than a couple of times, and you stumble upon one of those again, you are afraid to update the blog till the deluge dissappears. This is what I term a “Jail”. The idea came to me from PRI. They have a bunch of recorded shows on a CD called “Driveway Moments” where you’re driving home, listening to a story on your local NPR station. Suddenly, you find yourself in your driveway (or parking space or parking garage). You’ve got groceries to unload, your kids are waiting for dinner, and you may even need to go to the bathroom, but you are so captivated by the NPR feature, rather than turn the radio off, you stay in your car to hear the piece to the end.
Huh?
I’ve been in the opposite kind of ‘jail’ on one of my topical weblogs more than once–you happen to mention a term like ‘snowbird’ on your site, and you’re stuck with snowbird ads (unrelated to the site’s topic, uninteresting to the visitors) until AdSense updates again…
Oh, I know exactly what he’s talking about. I once held an entry for 3 or 4 days simply because my ad combination was serving me well and I knew that the moment I posted something new it would change. I waited until the income started dropping off on its own to post. I never heard it referred to as “jail” before. When I started AdSense last September I promised myself that I wouldn’t change my writing style to cater to the ads and I haven’t, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth either. 🙂
It hasn’t happened for me yet but I live in hope.
I know exactly what you mean about being afraid to update for fear of driving off the traffic. My moment was the day I really started doing well in terms of traffic. I had lost my adsense account thanks to my son helping out the blog income by clicking on my banners. I was in between them and adbrite when all of a sudden my blog really started getting attention. I had no advertising at all on the blog but for 5 consecutive days Stumbleupon, digg, and reddit sent me nearly 500k visitors. I was paralyzed. I didn’t know if I should revamp and get the new ads up or if I should wait and by the time I made a decision it was over. In essence by not making a decision I did make a decision to do nothing until it was too late. I don’t let myself sit back and wait anymore or second guess and change mid stream. I learned in in the fickle world making money through blogging, you have to make a decision quickly and carry through. Some times you win, some times you fail, but it is better than doing nothing or being wishy washy which always leads to failure.
If you didn’t know there are 7 Driveway Moments CD’s out now. 5 regular, a baseball one and a humor one.