I made a whopping 0,12€ with ads on this blog over the last 30 days (and just disabled them entirely, don’t want to get corrupted by all that money). However, what really caught my attention in the report was a domain that doesn’t belong to me (or my company):
So, apparently t****4web.com used my Adsense code on their site, resulting in a single ad impression (and nobody clicked on it, otherwise, my ad revenue would have been at least three two times bigger). How and why did this happen?
The innocent explanation is that their “Web Back Machine” (which sounds suspiciously similar to the non-profit Wayback Machine) archived one of my pages, including the Adsense ads. That’s possible, but what is more likely it that this is Adsense referrer spam, meant to get me to visit their website. I’ve got to admit that it worked, so now I have to write this blog post to justify my actions to myself, see, it was all in the name of research.
For further information on Adsense referrer spam, let me refer you to this comprehensive, well-written article.