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AdSense keeps rejecting my site

Article six, and this one is still unfolding. This game has not earned a single yen. Everything needed to show ads is in place; the site just won't pass review. The third application is coming up.

Last updated: 8 September 2026

What I'm trying to do: rewarded ads

Watching an ad earns stardust, which buys Shield or Gravity in the shop
Watching an ad earns stardust, which buys Shield or Gravity in the shop

What I want to add is a rewarded ad. Not something that appears on its own like a banner — the player chooses to watch an ad, and gets something in the game in return.

In this game, watching one ad gives you stardust. Stardust buys and powers abilities and unlocks save slots, so it becomes an option in the moment when you want just a bit more.

I chose this format for a simple reason: it doesn't interrupt play. In a game whose whole appeal is the rhythm of tapping and stacking, an ad that covers the screen unbidden would ruin it. If the player decides whether to watch, that problem disappears.

Technically it uses Google's ad API for H5 games. The game asks for an ad at a chosen moment, the ad plays, and you get back whether it was watched to the end. If it was, you hand over the reward. The implementation already works in test mode. All that remained was to serve real ads — or so I thought.

Why I want to monetise

Continuing to make things independently requires income. Obvious, but genuinely unavoidable. Right now I'm developing while drawing down savings — that is, running at a loss.

There are outgoings every month: the server, the domain, and the AI subscription. As I wrote last time, three person-months of work for $200 a month is remarkable value, but I'm still the one paying it. And then there's my own labour. I have a family to support.

How the reviews went

First attempt — rejected as soon as I added the site

I'd had an AdSense account for a while, so I assumed adding a new domain as a "site" would be enough.

The result was "low-value content", and the site was marked as unable to show ads.

At the time, the domain root simply redirected to a single game-introduction page. Effectively one page. In hindsight, of course it failed.

Second attempt — a much bigger site, rejected again

So I rebuilt. A portal front page, a how-to-play guide, news, an about page, contact details, and a proper privacy policy: seven pages.

I waited about a month and applied again. Same result: low-value content.

And now the third

What I'm preparing now is attempt three. This time I've added six planet-by-planet strategy guides, and this development log. The article you're reading is part of it.

Why it fails, as far as I can tell

What I found while researching is that there's a fundamental mismatch.

AdSense reviews judge by reading the text on a page. A crawler walks the site and looks at how much useful text is there. A browser game, though, just draws pictures into a canvas — so to a crawler the page is essentially empty.

However enjoyable the game is for a player, to the review system it is simply a page with no text. The two things don't meet.

I also came across people building children's educational apps, and people running utility sites, failing for the same reason. It isn't that games are disqualified; it's that sites with nothing to read have a hard time.

What I did about it

The conclusion was that I had to add things worth reading. Three actions:

  1. Built a portal site. Rebuilt the front page as a real entrance rather than a redirect
  2. Wrote strategy articles. Six, one per planet hazard. Checked the actual implementation as I wrote, and mixed in real astronomy
  3. Wrote this development log. A record of what I got stuck on building solo with AI, failures included

The site went from roughly 9,000 characters to over 30,000, and from 7 pages to 20.

The ironic part

I should be honest: I started writing these articles in order to pass a review.

But writing them turned out to be worthwhile. To write the strategy guides I re-read my own implementation and reconfirmed what the parameters meant. To write the dev log I organised six months of things I'd struggled with. Failing the review repeatedly is what made the site substantial — which is a fairly ironic outcome.

If it had passed first time, I'd still have one game and one landing page, and none of this would exist.

Where things stand, and what's next

The ad implementation is parked in test mode. There's no point running production ad code on an unapproved site, so the plan is to switch it over once approval comes through.

I've also stopped treating AdSense as the only route. Browser games can be monetised by distributing to game portals, where the criterion is whether the game is fun rather than how much text surrounds it. Either path passing would be enough.

I'll write again when the third result comes in. If it passes, there should be an article about actually running rewarded ads. If it fails, it becomes an article about the next move. Either way I get an article out of it, which isn't the worst deal.

If you're stuck on the same thing

I haven't passed yet either, so I'm in no position to lecture. Here goes attempt three.

Series: "I wish I'd known this from the start"

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