Given the fact that I’m starting a brand new site, which will eventually replace MoiMeme, this is its first post and I’ll try to give it some useful content.

If you’re into the Adsense program, you’ll have probably noticed that it’s now possible (for non-US creatures) to join the Firefox and Adsense affiliate program. Well, I was trying to publish the ad code, but I kept getting blank spaces instead of the buttons. So I emailed the Google guys:

Hi

I've been trying to join the referral program for Firefox and AdSense on
my website for a while now. I've copied and pasted the code provided on
the ad selection pages to my webpage and there are no ads appearing
nevertheless.

You can check it for yourselves on http://rage.against.org. View the
source code. The ad placement is signaled by  and . The code is there but the
end result (in the browser) is just a blank square.

Can this behavious be fixed?

Thanks.

and their response was:

Thank you for your email. I've reviewed your account, and have determined
that your referral buttons aren't displaying because you've included
"google.com" in your Competitive Ad Filter list. At this time, filtering
ads from google.com will prevent referral buttons from displaying
properly. Our engineers are aware of this issue and are working to correct
it.

In the meantime, we recommend you remove google.com from your Competitive
Ad Filter list if you wish to use referrals. Please note that it can take
up to 3 hours before any changes to your filter take effect. We apologize
for any inconvenience.

So what’s the Competitive Ad Filter anyway? And why did I have google.com on it?
According to Google itself: “Google AdSense provides the functionality to block specific ads from appearing on your pages. Although Google ads are highly targeted to the content of your page, there may be situations in which you don’t want to display particular advertisements -­ for example, you may wish to block ads leading to competitors’ sites. The competitive ad filter works by blocking ads that link to specific URLs.(…)”

However, there are other things that can be accomplished by tweaking this list. Most bloggers don’t get enough income from AdSense because it shows ads about irrelevant stuff which pay less than the average. Think about “get you own blog” ads and the such. This procedure is not against the service policy, so you don’t have to worry at all about using it… There are a zillion lists of “interesting” Competitive Ad Filter address lists, so why don’t you give it a try?