Links and Resources on Google Adsense

what I'd like to know is how much an average or less than average website makes out ad-sense, I never could figure this out.

I found your site while doing searches for Drupal information, and have found it to be both interesting and intelligently written. Thank you!
(/flattery)
:-D

One aspect of AdSense, however, that you haven't yet experienced, is its draconian policy on invalid clicks, which is set up in such a way that you can be penalized for what other people do on (or to) your site, making the AdSense program unsuitable for mission-critical revenue and calling Google's business ethics into question.

There is a practice of Google swamping whereby some advertisers implement bots to seek out and click on competitor's ads in an effort to swamp those competitors' ad budgets. The unfortunate side effect of this is that if the ads on a site are targeted by those bots, Google bans that site from the AdSense program and denies payment of any money earned to date but not yet paid. Emails to AdSense asking them to look into the source of the invalid clicks are met with form letters saying Google will not explain what happened.

I found out about this when an acquaintance of mine was banned from the program through no fault of his own. Fortunately for him, one of his fans happened to work for AdSense and looked into the matter as a personal favor, confirming that the invalid clicks all originated from Linux machines on a very narrow range of IPs, and in a very short time frame. The conclusion reached was that he was not at fault, and he remains the only person I've ever heard of who has been reinstated after being banned.

When it happened to us, though, and to several other webcomic artists, I was shocked, since one would expect a program like this to have some sort of safeguards in place, especially after discovering just how flawed their system is. Other, supposedly "lesser" players in the ad game have an innovative approach to invalid clicks--They *gasp* simply do not count them. It is difficult to beleive that Google hasn't the capability to do the same. They just choose not to.

We complied to the letter and the spirit of our agreement with Google Adsense, going so far as to email them when one of us accidentally clicked on one of our links to let them know about it. Yet based on the actions of someone else, they dropped us (and many others) and refused to explain or look into the matter. They still owe us a couple hundred dollars, and all emails to the program have resulted in (at first) form letters or (later) silence.