Wow...turned down in 10 seconds flat!

I think that the last time that I was turned down so quickly was when I was a teenager and asked the most popular girl (Charlotte) in our class out to the local drive-in.  It was awkward, and she was polite, but the answer was definitely NO.

So, I'm no stranger to rejection, but I've got to admit that the AdSense gatekeepers are giving Charlotte a very close run for her money in the race to reject this poor ol' boy from the sticks...wah, wah, wah...

From the time that I updated my blog to have a Privacy statement (at the very end of the this blog page) and resubmitted my request for an AdSense account and received a new rejection email was...wait for it...74 minutes!

The last time that I tried the approval process, the total time it took for the evaluation folks to process my request and reject it was 10 DAYS!

I've got to give it to the AdSense gatekeepers; they are getting really prompt at telling me NO.

However, here's my beef with them at this point in time.

I don't mind being told NO.  I don't like it, but I'm used to it.  After all, I've been married to a wonderful woman for over 33 years and she has told me NO almost daily about one thing or another.  You get it right? I'm used to being told NO.

However, I do believe that it's a simple sign of RESPECT for the entity that is saying NO to be specific on why they are saying NO.  What I'm feeling from AdSense/Google/Blogger at this point in time is a total lack of respect for me as a potential customer/partner of their services.

Here's a series of screen shots that show my latest round of interaction with AdSense and Blogger on this AdSense approval request:

• Here's the AdSense screen asking me to resubmit my application request:
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• 
• Here's the AdSense screen that thanks me for my application:
• 
  
• 
• Here's the Blogger page telling me that they are waiting for AdSense to approve me:
• 
  
• 
• And here's my newest rejection letter:
• 

My problem with this response is that, after leaving my application request in the queue for 74 minutes, they gave me the same generic response that they gave me after leaving my previous application request in their queue for 10 days.  They list 6 bullets of what they mean by "insufficient content".  How about if they just come out and say, hey dude, your content sucks, or hey dude, you've got  to have content that shows us (the folks at AdSense) respect for our efforts rather than being a sarcastic tool?

Really!  Really? Really!!!

Found a site that explains AdSense a bit more...

Hey there, one of my friends just turned me on to another website that explains some of the things that you must do prior to successfully applying for an AdSense account.

Here's the URL:

12 Things to Do Before Applying for Google AdSense

One thing that this blog really emphasizes is that you need a Privacy Policy and a Disclosure Policy on your blog before the AdSense gatekeepers will grant you access to the AdSense Kingdom.

So, my blog is running on Blogger.com (as you can see from the URL in your browser's address bar).  Unfortunately, I have yet to find the Blogger.com option that gives me the option of having a custom privacy policy in the footer of my blog.  Big, badda, boom! (oblique reference to the 5th Element)

Update: So, I found a way to include a privacy statement at the bottom of the Blogger page.  To see what I put as our privacy statement, scroll down to the absolute bottom of this web page.  Nothing fancy, but it's still a valid privacy statement.

How to Digitally Sign your Android app.

Another adventure underway.

When I went to my "Developer Console" at developer.android.com, with the goal of taking my first version of the "Oregon Feelings" app and "publishing it" to the "beta channel".

Your AdSense account has been disapproved!

Well, two rounds of applying for an AdSense account and two rounds of denials.  This is kind of a pain in the butt!  All we want is to be able to monetize our Android apps, and the only way that we can find to get an AdSense account is to submit the URL of a website that is worthy of serving up AdSense advertisements, which seems like a totally parallel track to having advertisements and in-app purchases in our Android apps.

Here's what the Google AdSense rejection email looks like:




And, here's what our current Blogger Earnings page looks like after the second round of "disapproval":



So, what's will be our next attempt?  Well, how about submitting the URL of one of our Android apps in the Play Store?

We figure that submitting this URL will be the only real accurate way to show the AdSense gatekeepers the property that we actually spend our time coding, rather than some arbitrary website on which we really have no interest in displaying their ads anyway.

We want to display ads in our Android apps!  We want to offer in-app purchases in our Android apps!

We'll let you know how this new direction in gaining AdSense approval turns out.

Your AdSense account is awaiting approval.

Sorry, I've been living with the,  "Your AdSense account is awaiting approval." in my Blogger Earnings page for quite a while now, and I thought that, hey, there is no one at Blogger or AdSense to talk to about this issue, so why not do a blog entry on it.

So, why does it take soooooo long for a very simple approval to take place?

Is it because of the desire to not allow AdSense users to host advertisements on "bad pages" (e.g., porn or hate sites, or maybe sites that host only "stolen" content)?

Or is there some other deep seated, secret evaluation process by which the guardians of good and proper at AdSense use to evaluate requests to have an AdSense account for the purpose of publishing advertisements on our websites?

Right now, the evaluation and approval process is largely black-box to outsiders like me, so all I can do is ask random questions, like, "Why are you being such a tool, AdSense?".

If there was a hint of transparency in the evaluation process that maybe showed a few of the following items, then at least I could understand where I am in the black-hole of AdSense approval:

• How many times have I submitted for AdSense approval
• What was the reason for lack of approval each time, with specifics on exactly what was wrong with the request for approval
• Bad content
• Content that offends the palate
• Stolen content
• Just a darn shitty site, too bad to host paid advertising
• How many other folks are currently in the AdSense approval queue
• How many AdSense reviewers are currently working on the AdSense approval queue
• Or, how far behind is the AdSense approval robot in it's approval processing
• How many wanna-be AdSense hosting site authors are also writing blogs about the very crappy AdSense review and evaluation process
• Where (numerically or percentage-wise) does my AdSense approval request stand in the current approval queue
• In which part of the world does the reviewer reside (just a to satisfy my morbid curiosity)

There is really no solid reason for such a lack of transparency of the AdSense approval process.  Such a black-box approach really makes me wonder why AdSense is so insecure about their process that they have to obfuscate the evaluation and approval process.

Also, it is so rude to not offer real customer support for AdSense.  There are no publicly published email or telephone support numbers for AdSense.  What?!!!  How Rude!!!

When AdSense is the gateway for enabling commerce in your Android apps, and the AdSense approval process is to obfuscated and lengthy, how is this benefiting Google?  

Maybe Google feels that they already have plenty of places to host advertisements, so they have chosen to put the AdSense evaluation and approval process in place to act as a gating factor.  I.e., "if we make it confusing and a lengthy process, then we'll be able to accurately predict our ad growth very accurately"?

Oh well, I'll probably add to this AdSense rant as the evaluation process stretches from two to three weeks, or maybe even longer.

Thanks Google/AdSense!  What ever happened to "Do No Evil"?

Protecting our digital assets

I'm facing a dilemma regarding using our digital assets in android, iOS, and web apps.

Several of our products use high resolution digital assets to which we are the legal copyright holder.  In some cases, we have been granted copyright ownership by the original owners, but in most cases, our digital assets are original works that we have created and which we cherish and hold dear to our hearts.

Now, why would that that cause us a dilemma?  Well, primarily because when we use one or more of these digital assets in one or more of our apps, we have the following, often conflicting goals:

• We want to use high resolution versions of our digital assets to enhance the viewer's experience, 
• We want to use a resolution which ensures that the assets are not too large, which will cause under-powered phones, tablets, and other computing devices to evoke a user experience that is sub-optimal
• We want to protect our digital assets from being "snatched and re-purposed" for use in other vendor's products or advertising or simply for people's viewing pleasure outside of our intended viewing technologies

So, say that we want to provide a display and consumption model which attempts to compromise between these goals.  What are some of our options?

• Subtly watermark the digital assets
• Include a copyright statement visibly embedded into a corner of each digital asset
• Degrade the digital asset quality so that they are not attractive enough for others to snatch
• Just say, what the heck, put our best digital assets in our products and don't worry about it
• Encrypt the digital assets so that they are not usable by asset snatchers, only decrypting each asset during the period of time that the asset is being displayed

While developing a set of apps that display a lot of digital photos, we have found that a practical size for our digital photos is about 6M bytes, either as a 2000 x 3000 or a 3000 x 2000 image.  When storing these images as Resources, that's the size goal that we shoot for.  This size allows us to show nice resolutions in our mobile apps, while not putting too much strain on the graphics systems involved.

We also support the display in our apps of user-submitted photos.  We have considered a couple of options here:

• Limit the size of the photos that the user submits to 6M bytes
• Allow the user to submit any size of image.  If the image is smaller than 6M bytes, we just use it as is.  However, if the image is larger than 6M bytes, then our code will use the android graphics engine to re-sample the images so that a standard 6M byte image is displayed.

More thoughts and fleshing-out to follow...

Stuff we learned about creating a graphically intensive Android app...

To be fleshed out soon:

• long-standing and recognized bug in destroying bitmaps
• cycle page viewer nutty numbering
• using a fragment within an activity to display our graphics
• maximum usable/renderable size of jpeg images
• just a small fraction of the goodies that we experienced, to be built-out and expanded upon very soon