AdBlock Plus Breaks Google Adsense

I hate doing Google Adsense. I actually hate doing anything even remotely connected with internet money grubbing, because I have to crawl out of playful mode and face the upleasant reality that degenerate stupid things make money and fun interesting things don’t. As a result of extreme laziness I had let my Google Analytics and Adsense fall apart over the past year. But with the crappy economy well into its second year and gigs few and far between, I found I was scraping the bottom of the bank account and needed to rustle up a little change.

Anyway, I own a few unused domains and I decided to try to squeeze a few bucks out of them using Google Adsense for domains, which is new to me. So off I go to do battle with Adsense. As I was configuring away I thought how odd it is that this website is serving absolutely no styles. I was able to add my desired domains without the benefit of styles. Creating the required additional records in their DNS zone files was no problem because the DNS stuff is done on wherever your DNS is hosted. After the DNS changes were acknowledged by Google I wanted to tweak the keywords. When it came to actually editing the Google settings for the domains in Google’s Adsense manager, nothing was working.

I thought, “could Google be broken?” There were a few random posts and tweets corroborating what I had just observed, but if Google were truly broken there would be a massive tweet wave about it. Then it suddenly dawned on me! This is ad related stuff so they are probably using their own ad serving technology on their management pages. And Google being somewhat large and all, I’m sure any ad blocking software would be aware of its signature. It so happens I had recently installed AdBlock Plus for Firefox. I love AdBlock Plus. It quietly keeps me blithely unaware of some, but not all, of the distracting and ugly ad noise that is just an ugly bandwidth-wasting fact of online life. This is the first time AdBlock Plus actually interfered with anything I actually wanted to do. It’s also easy to fix the problem. The hard part was realizing what the problem was!! Poof, I whitelisted Google.com and all my problems are solved.

Whitelist a site as shown above, by going to the ABP icon at the upper right corner of your browser window. If ABP is enabled, the icon will be red. Pull down the dropdown and select Disable on google.com. After that, the icon will appear green whenever you are on the whitelisted domain.

To be honest I hate landing on a parked domain when I’m trying to find something. Parked domains with ads are pond scum. Intentionally inflicting that which I personally abhor on others makes me feel dirty. If you sympathize, how about doing one of the above:

  • Hire me for your next web gig. A great deal more than you think can be done via skype and remotely.
  • Check my artistic efforts and help me get famous and fed via creative stuff so I don’t have to do this squalid ad-grubbing.

18 comments to AdBlock Plus Breaks Google Adsense

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