I’d pretty much call this a failure of contextual advertising placement.
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Featuring...
    Oh, I get tired of that. “Results not typical” and “for illustrative purposes only.” Well, the Federal Trade Commission’s handing down new guidelines on advertising and endorsements. “Results not typical” won’t be acceptable anymore. It also affects celebs, bloggers and endorsements of all sorts. A short, but true tip you’ll hear in dozens of forms around board-room tables, that everyone seems to forget as soon as they leave the room. Distilled down to its core: A hundred people who have a conversation about your brand are worth far more than a hundred-thousand who drive past your billboard. Whether or not you are actually a part of that conversation. We all know it, right up until the moment that someone signs a cheque. Go figure. Nothing a games-publisher does says “We have no respect whatsoever for our customers” than booth-babes – except perhaps the EA Sports division. I know, some of you EA marketing folks are among the regular readers here, and I’m not tarring you all with the same brush, but you might want to hide under your desks for a few minutes, because I’m going to speak very plainly.
Only now they’re advertising on my sidebar, quite unexpectedly (at least at the time I’m writing this), which makes me feel a bit awkward about actually posting about them. But darn it all, I was planning on writing about them anyway!
Some of you obviously have noticed the donation button over there in the sidebar. I’m not really sure what the etiquette for these donations are is, exactly. Well, it has been most of a day now with the new blogging setup and, so far as I am aware, it hasn’t brought about the downfall of Western Civilization, nor have any readers been accidentally incinerated. At least not yet. You may have noticed that around the middle of April, after a bit of a stretch of inactivity, I worked things over, created the comic archive, updated all my Google AdSense advertising blocks. After quite a while with no revenue from AdSense, the new adblocks seemed to be targeting very well on the whole, and with some general reworking daily ad revenue was really starting to be very good. Then I got a lucky scoop with the Fallout Trademarks piece, which got linked to by most of the major gaming blogs. A couple other posts got some exposure, and briefly, my blog’s traffic surged. The new AdSense blocks were targeting admirably, it seems, and it looked like I’d accumulate enough for a cheque from Google within a mere 15 days. That’s pretty darn good, and welcome income besides. Then, on Friday morning (US-time), 13 days after refitting everything and working to boost visibility and revenue, I was hit with circumstances beyond my control. You may recall the enigmatic post about it. What happened? Google AdSense suspended my account. Seriously. Why? You know, I have no idea at all. “[Y]our AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers.“ There’s an appeal form, and I appealed it right away. They ask for additional information that might be helpful, but since they don’t (as a matter of policy) reveal why they’re suspending your account, it’s hard to figure out what information might be useful to appeal that. So… the appeal is now 6 days old, and the answer’s just come back in, a few minutes ago. “Thanks for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we’ve re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we’re unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.“ Not that I actually do understand, but there’s essentially nothing I can do. I imagine the sudden surge of activity after a relatively slow six months tripped some internal alarm. Over the weekend (advertising-less and all during the appeal period) I got a surge of record amounts of traffic to the blog and comic (around two orders of magnitude better) — and no way to earn a single US cent off of it. I’ve tentatively plugged Adbrite in as an alternative. We’ll see how that goes. I’m in the process of dismantling the AdSense ad-blocks. The revenues I’d accumulated are forfeit (which is a bit of a pest, as I was sort of counting on that money), and I’m feeling quite a bit like I’ve just been punished for doing well. 
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