Rejected by AdSense Again? What I Did Instead of Waiting

There is a particular kind of stuck that anyone running a small site will recognise. You apply to Google AdSense. You get rejected. The email does not tell you what was wrong. You change something, wait, apply again, get rejected again. Meanwhile the site earns nothing.

I got tired of that loop and stopped waiting for permission. Instead of applying a sixth time, I set up a different ad network, Adsterra, and got ads running on the site.

The honest trade-off

Most posts about AdSense alternatives sell them as an upgrade. They are not. Here is the part you should hear before you switch anything:

• The ad quality is lower than AdSense.
• The RPM is unremarkable.
• Some of the formats are aggressive. Load your own site on a phone afterwards and decide honestly whether you would still read it.

This is a way to stop the bleeding on a small site, not a better deal. If your traffic is already meaningful, the AdSense payout is worth the work of fixing the application instead.

What it has actually earned

Two dollars, over a couple of weeks.

I am putting that number in because nobody else does. Every post about AdSense alternatives talks about setup and none of them tell you what lands in the account afterwards. Two dollars is not a business. On a small site it is roughly what you should expect, and anyone promising you meaningfully more at this traffic level is selling something.

What makes it worth doing anyway is that the alternative was zero while I waited on another application. I have since added more blogs to the same setup, so the honest position is that the number should rise, and I will report it either way.

Do the other half in parallel

Five rejections usually means one fixable thing, not five. AdSense is rejecting the site, not you, and the email rarely says which part. The usual culprits are thin or half-finished pages, missing privacy and about pages, navigation that leads nowhere, or content that reads as written for ads rather than for readers.

So the order I would suggest is:

1. Put an alternative network on now, so the site is not earning zero for another three months.
2. Meanwhile fix the actual application: real pages, proper policy pages, a site that makes sense to a stranger who lands on it.
3. Reapply once, properly, rather than repeatedly with small tweaks. Repeated applications with nothing substantial changed are what turn a fixable rejection into a stuck one.

The setup, start to finish

I recorded the whole Adsterra setup because the documentation is thin and most of what is online is affiliate content rather than an actual walkthrough.

The verdict

Worth doing if your site is small, new, and currently earning nothing while you wait. Not worth doing if you already have traffic that AdSense rates would actually pay on. Treat it as a stopgap that buys you time to fix the real problem, and you will not be disappointed by it.

Same question, different experiment: I also spent 100,000 steps finding out whether the apps that promise to pay you for walking actually pay.

And a riskier one: I am now putting €100 a month into 3x and 5x leveraged ETFs and tracking it in public.

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