The new Adsense terms of service prohibits term paper related sites from using Google Adsense. This creates an inherent conflict between the the Adsense and AdWords policy.

A few months ago, I found out the hard way that Google was going to ban term paper related websites. In the Adsense terms and conditions released in the beginning of January, Google made this stance official by adding “Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays ” to the “site may not include” policy.

On the January 30th episode of ShoeMoney’s Net Income, Brian Axe of Google explained the change by saying:

This is consistent with our AdWords policy and primarily Google just has a big responsibility in things that we help to monetize…We received quite a bit of feedback from educators, and we felt the right thing to do was to not help to fuel this industry…We do not want to fund them with Adsense ads.

Brian’s comment was very interesting to me on a few levels:

1. The Adwords Content Policy does not mention banning term paper related sites.
2. A Google search for “term papers” shows all sorts of AdWords ads for sites selling term papers and related services. These very sites would definitely not fit within the new Adsense guidelines.

So Google does not want to “help to fuel this industry” but AdWords provides a highly efficient vehicle for these companies to gain customers. Something does not make sense here, and I hope that Google can create a consistent policy between AdWords and Adsense to remove the confusion.