Topic: Experience with Advertisers

[jbridges87]

Hey all, I have applied to both Adsense and Medianet, and was rejected by both.
Unfortunately, I can't get either to respond regarding the reasoning. I'm not sure if it's because of content, board style, page views, etc. It's hard to fix something when I don't even know what the problem is...

Have any of you had your SMF forum rejected, and were you able to figure out why so that you could correct the issue and reapply? Perhaps you were even accepted the second go around.

I'd like to hear of your experiences with advertising on your forum.

Was your forum accepted for advertisements? Which company are you with?
Do you run affiliate marketing instead of ad companies, perhaps you run both?

[vbgamer45]

Lack of traffic, content if it is based on the link in the signature.

[jbridges87]

Thanks for reading, but I'm actually looking for real world experience that others have had with advertising companies [Adsense, Medianet, etc]

I'm not interested in speculating on the issues. I'm hoping to get some actual data to go off.

[Arantor]

The companies you mention aren’t going to give you that data, because it’s secret data.

But honestly if there were anyone here I would trust for this, it’d be vbgamer45 who runs a whole bunch of forums. If he says the issue is a lack of content, the issue is a lack of content.

55 posts... that’s just not going to fly in my experience either. It used to be the case that you needed at least a couple of thousand posts to have enough material to attract enough people to visit, I imagine it’s even higher now.

You probably need to be putting 20-30 posts per day in yourself/with friends to get a forum off the ground, it’s not like it used to be, the days of “build it and they will come” are long gone.

[Deaks]

jbridge87,

To quote Google Adsense Help pages

Valuable and original content is paramount to building a strong and loyal user base. When users enjoy your content, they share the experience with others, and this in turn helps you to grow your site.

So while you do not wish to listen to people that actually know what they are talking about aka vbgamer its written in black and white on the Google Adsense pages

ref: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7299563

[jbridges87]

Again, thanks for reading, but I'm not looking for people to speculate.

Do I have little content on my site? yes
Is that the reason I was rejected for ads? Maybe [Unless you work for the company and can confirm, you're simply stating opinion]

What I'm looking for most is someone who has gone through the experience of being rejected, and perhaps found out the reasoning behind it?

Hearing about any and all real world experience on the matter would be helpful.

Please do not reply to this thread if you're just going to continue bashing my site, and telling me my content is garbage, and/or there's little amount of it, etc etc

[vbgamer45]

I have used both advertisers above. I will say I have seen many sites rejected/forums and it is mainly due to lack of traffic you need to have a certain amount of visitors before going for ads. Otherwise I would suggest find advertisers directly
For example media.net
https://www.media.net/legal/programguidelines/

Contain significant amount of original content that is updated regularly and does not infringe any third party intellectual property rights
Have a reasonable volume of visitors already using the website

media.net is harder to get approved than adsense generally.

[Arantor]

So basically you want people from those companies to explain it to you. Ain’t happening, not worth their time.

[jbridges87]

So basically you want people from those companies to explain it to you. Ain’t happening, not worth their time.

Basically, no.
If you read the thread title, and took time to read my posts, you would see that I'm asking for peoples personal experiences with advertisers.

If you would happen to know how to get confirmation of my rejection, that would simply be a bonus.

[Arantor]

And you discounted two people who have experience with advertisers, ergo I can only assume that nothing short of direct confirmation from employees of those companies will satisfy you because, guess what, you’re not special. They don’t have to justify or explain anything to you. They said no, you had the best likely explanation from people who have managed to do the ad thing in the past (and one of whom does it ongoing) but because it didn’t meet an unachievable bar of confirmation, it’s not good enough.

I have never seen a forum, ever, get ads with that few posts, not even 15 years ago when forums were still hot property.

And if you’d read our responses, we weren’t telling you your content was rubbish, we were telling you that you need more of it. Much more.

Why would an advertiser pay you money to advertise on a site that has so little content no one goes to it?

[jbridges87]

I didn't discount anybody.
How am I supposed to know whether the people that commented were sharing their personal experience or simple opinion? With no background context, how do you honestly expect me to know peoples past experiences?

In any case, your pompous arrogance is unsettling. I've seen it often from you before. You always seem to have a way to put people down while sharing your remarks. It's never a simple reply with you, always some personal jab to go with it.

I'm not interested in your condescending remarks.
If you have nothing useful to offer the topic subject, please consider refraining from posting in it.

[Arantor]

Mate, you have more posts here, than on your own site. Maybe you think you should get a slice of ad revenue from here?

Or maybe, you should focus on making your site awesome so people find the wealth of content there and engage with you.

[Shambles]

I tried for an adsense review (3 times) and was rejected as follows:



My argument with them was that they restricted their viewtracker to my portal, which didn't change that often. Trying to get them to view the actual forum (~470,000 posts) was impossible.

[jbridges87]

@Shambles - That's unfortunate you couldn't get everything setup with adsense, but at least their reply included some useful information to go off.
It's encouraging to know they at least have a system in place to provide feedback.

Did you end up going with another ad provider?

[shadav]

I get denied all the time....
I have 2 sites approved
2 sites in review
2 site declined (which  they are correct, there is no content on the site but a splash page, I was just linking it to the webmasters account) the other is declined because it's a vaping related site and google doesn't like that


one of the times that I was declined was because there was no privacy police in place, once I put one and resubmitted they accepted....
there's usually at least a (sometimes rather vague) reason why it was denied for you to try to fix

[jbridges87]

@Shadav - I can understand the disapproval for the vaping site. That makes sense. Affiliate links may be a better option for a site like that.

The attached screenshot is pretty informative, similar to what @Shambles posted. When I applied, I was just given an email that stated 'there was an issue', but no other information. When sending them a message, I never received a reply.

I will have to follow up on that again, and see what comes of it.

[shadav]

when you log into your adsense account, click on the sites menu, then click on the site that needs attention, under show details what does it say there?

[jbridges87]

The site section was not enabled for me last time, even after receiving the message about 'their was an issue'.

I had removed the code after the 2nd failed attempt. I just re-added it to my site, and it will take a while for them to re-evaluate.
I will see if that site section becomes active after I hear back.

[Mick.]

Imma butt in and say that 60 posts in not going to cut it. Once you reach 500-1000 try again. I must say, when I started my own forum 10 yrs ago I had less than that bit got approved.  These days I dont use adsense tho. I use other ad servers

[jbridges87]

Interestingly enough, I put in another request with Adsense, and was approved.

I can't tell you what the initial rejection reason was, but perhaps it was simply a matter of having the wrong person review the forum the first 2 times.
You know when you call in to a customer service, and get someone who isn't very helpful, so you call back a 2nd or 3rd time, and finally you get someone who will take care of your request?