HN Explorer

Tell HN: Google deactivated Adsense on richtweets.com

8 points by techvibe ↗ HN
A few years a go I registered the domain richtweets.com and coded the the app during a weekend. On richtweets.com you create a page and post the link and some characters on Twitter, using the Twitter API.

I did no marketing, but the site got some traction and has now about 50K visits monthly. (https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/richtweets.com)

I used Adsense, to monetize the site, but Google deactivated Adsense on richtweets.com today and this is the reason http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66361

11 comments

[ 19.5 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] thread
AznHisoka
well, Google is correct - your site has little to no original content. So what's your beef with that?
debacle
I believe RichTweets is the hosting area for the rich tweets that then get linked via Twitter.

At least that's how I understand it.

AznHisoka
again, that's very little original content?
debacle
I don't follow. Would you say that tumblr has very little original content? That's basically similar to what this service is, only it also automatically tweets a link to your rich tweet for you.
AznHisoka
Tweets are not exactly a ton of content.
arn
you still don't seem to understand how the site works. the tweets aren't the content. they just link to the content.

example: http://richtweets.com/2ri9c

AznHisoka
Ok, now I get how it works. I would presume the site contains a lot of rich tweets that are very thin on content then, even if there are some that are rich in content. That's what Google has a problem with. If I were site owner, I'd put noindex on pages with less than X words, and not put Ads on those tweets as well.

In general, Adsense on a very generic site like this isn't that effective anyway. Ads aren't very targeted and Google also doesn't like that. They don't want advertisers to have a poor experience.

techvibe
You are right. Adsense is also not effective on this site, but Adsense was the only way to monetize the site. Google deactivated Adsense without any warning, so I had no time to remove Adsense on pages with little content.
cannibal
You probably shouldn't have had them on pages with little content in the first place. You did break one of their policies, but if it's not effective anyways, you haven't really lost anything.
techvibe
Really I haven't lost much, but it is lesson for everyone, not to reply on a single source of revenue.
techvibe
It is actually like a blogging service like blogger.com or wordpress.com So if you want to post more than 140 chars on Twitter, you can login with your twitter account and publish your text, photos or videos.

Google is not right. The site has a lot of original content. Even Brazilian government authorities use richtweets.com to talk to their people. We have over 20k posts an these posts get a lot of comments, retweets and Facebook shares.