I called Jason a Tosser last week and said he was breaking Google Adsense TOS..

Well maybe he is maybe he isn’t, So I went on a little undercover exercise, first off I pulled one of his sites apart www.hackaday.com, and these are the results.

Hackday runs 3 ad units and 1 ad link unit completely in the line with Google Adsense TOS. But I still see 6 units sometimes, After 12.3 seconds of investigation I found that what he was doing was using Tribal Fusion to supply ad stock as well, but just like the Google Adsense program you can set up a third party Ad if they don’t have enough stock.

So I email them something like this:

I have been asked by a client that currently runs adsense, they are looking to test some new programs, I’ve been tasked with finding certain information out..

Our Clients biggest problem is Ad Inventory, so we are looking for someone that can provide targeted advertisers and also allow us to swap in our Adsense code if no Primary AD stock is available. Can your program do this ?

And they replied:

Yes! Without a doubt. The first step towards joining our network is to apply via our website. Go to:

http://www.tribalfusion.com/SmartPublishers/apply.html. In the interest of saving time, please know that sites must see a minimum of 2000 unique users per day to be eligible for acceptance into our network. If your site does not see that kind of traffic, it is unlikely that you will be accepted.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any more questions. Good luck!!

So the Question I needed to ask was “Was this ok to in the eyes of Google” well Jason thinks so, But I’m not sure so I asked Jenstar to read this before I posted it and give me her comments :

“It is not against the AdSense terms to run AdSense and tribal fusion on the same page. But publishers have to make sure that doing so doesn’t violate the AdSense terms. For example, some tribal fusion ads (such as Vontage) mimic AdSense ads, which is against the terms. And if publishers follow Tribal Fusion’s advice and serve AdSense as their alternative ad when there is no available ad invent inventory, they must make sure they don’t violate the AdSense terms by serving more than 3 ad units and 1 ad link unit per page. As for WeblogsInc specifically, he did post he has permission from Google to do this. Since Google regularly runs beta testing to experiment with new ad formats etc, he could be a part of a beta test or has another arrangement with AdSense to do so.

However, only WeblogsInc or Jason could confirm this.

DaveN