zlacker

They probably can't, since it's an extension and thus uses the user's browser, IP, cookies etc (Adsense does use mouse tracking and other techniques that will likely flag these clicks as suspect, requiring additional analysis). Therein lies the problem. It appears to them as if someone is going and clicking on every ad, or is using an automated headless browser to click on ads. That can easily get you banned. Google doesn't care about who is doing it, they only know that it is happening on your site, and as a result will treat your site as a threat to the Adsense network.

>>downan+(OP)
How about clicks from browsers that have this plugin installed are just not counted? That sounds simple enough.

>>ryanhu+Z1
They could certainly do that in this case, but they are probably trying to send a strong message to would-be developers of similar extensions. One is a nuissance; a thousand would be much more difficult to chase down and block.

Also, if these developers really wanted to, they could distribute it directly from their site and dynamically generate the extension, packaged with a unique identifier, for each download. This would make it effectively unblockable. So simply identifying an install of this specific extension is not a solution.

>>ryanhu+Z1
How can they tell if the browser has this plugin installed?

>>downan+(OP)
> (Adsense does use mouse tracking and other techniques that will likely flag these clicks as suspect, requiring additional analysis). Therein lies the problem.

Actually, Google does track all of this stuff already:

http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-...

Google could decide to just ignore IPs that host users that display this behavior pattern. But yeah, it's "easier" to just ban the offending Chrome extension.

>>icebra+1c
Let's make AdN a thing like privoxy, where it runs on the network and does all of this outside of a browser, and for all clients on the network.