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More adventures in Blogger advertising

Another eleven days and the results of the second review are back. Unfortunately the same message, 'Your blog isn't ready to show ads yet/you need to fix some things to continue', appeared in the Blogger control panel Earnings tab.


Again, I dropped into e-mail first to see what the response was there,


and was met with the same cryptic message as the first time, 'our specialists have found that it does not meet our programme criteria', but no more clues than that.

However, the AdSense control panel was more straightforward,


'Low value content'.

Well OK, I had sort of expected this, at least I knew it was a possible outcome of the process. But as I have already stated I'm not going to rewrite the site for the tiny amount of revenue it is likely to bring in.

But let's review the four resources the AdSense message provides links to anyway;
  • Minimum content requirements
    • The full relevant text is;
    We do not allow monetisation where there is no content. No content includes placeholder content for sites or apps under construction.
    This is not the issue.
  • Make sure that your site has unique high quality content and a good user experience
    • Provide enough unique content
    You should provide content that gives your users a reason to visit and return to your site. When you create content, it’s important to ask yourself if it provides substantial value and originality when compared to other sites covering similar subjects, as this will attract more visitors to your site.
    Are users coming back for content? Are there even any real people reading this? Basically I don’t know. Does the blog provide 'substantial value'? Again I don't know, but I guess that it depends on your metric.
    Make certain that there’s no duplicate content
    I haven't scraped or re-used content. Although I have repeated content to reinforce the process of creating a citation in Wikipedia, but that was only in a single post.
    Build a good user experience with navigational elements
    I could have probably done a better job of categorising posts. Other than that the site is based on a Blogger-supplied template, so what was not to like?
  • Webmaster quality guidelines for thin content
    • These are mostly about copy-pasted articles and don’t seem to apply
  • Webmaster quality guidelines
    • These are just a recap of the preceding three points
From my reading of the full content of the pages above it looks like there is a slant towards sites that have a theme/purpose/any rhyme or reason. In addition, AdSense appears to be interested in return visitors as they were mentioned a couple of times in the text; also regular posting was noted more than once. Taken together this explains why commercial sites are desperate to enrol you into systems that give you alerts when new content is posted.

Ultimately I think Google has looked at the site's visitor stats and calculated that there wasn't enough advertising revenue to be had, then used the available wiggle room in their T&Cs to decline the site.

There are two ways to progress now. Try a different (hosted) site or improve/increase the content on this blog whilst paying more attention to the user stats and then get the site re-re-reviewed after adding more posts/views.

The first of these is the easy route, but I haven't updated the hosted blog for some time so the content isn't recent, even so it does have a similar amount of posts to this one. However, unlike this blog, it is 'themed', which would appear to be an advantage. Also, as it is hosted on Blogger (ie has a domainname.blogspot.com address) Google is probably filtering out almost all of the spam phishing hits that skullcinema.com gets, which should also stand in its' favour. But I am similarly in the dark as to who, if anyone, is viewing the site.

As for the second path, posting more content is just a matter of time, improving it is more complicated.

How do I measure 'improvement'?

Google Analytics was mentioned more than once in the resources. So a more in depth look at the Stats tab of the Control Panel and an investigation of Google Analytics might be in order.

As it is only two weeks for a review I think I will roll the dice on the hosted account just in case it works. Meanwhile it seems it is time for a closer look at the Blogger Stats tab and Google Analytics.
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