First of all, if you're not aware of DoW2DB, it's my latest website - a database of information about the units in Dawn of War II.

One of the reasons for making the site was to see how well Google AdSense (online adverts provided by Google) works. Despite applying for AdSense 3 weeks ago, I've only just been able to put up ads on DoW2DB.

  1. February 14th: Applied for AdSense. Application page stated that it should take a day or two to review the application, help pages state it may take up to one week if they are busy.
  2. February 26th (almost 2 weeks later): Got email reply stating that the application was refused due to an invalid or incorrect postal address. This confused me, as the address in my application matched exactly the address on my bank statement. Hence I sent an email to AdSense support with a scan of a bank statement with address on attached, and queried why they decided that my address was invalid. Got an automated reply "We noticed that you may have contacted us without first visiting our Help Center: ... To receive faster responses to your questions, we encourage you to visit our help resources -- they're full of instant, reliable answers to many common questions and issues ...". The Help Center does not contain any entries on Google deciding that postal addresses are incorrect when they are not.
  3. March 5th (one week later): Still no human response from AdSense support. Decided to re-apply to AdSense without making any changes to the application. Application page stated that it should take a day or two to review the application.
  4. March 7th (two days later): Application approved.
I'm intrigued as to why it took Google much longer than their stated two days, and almost double their busy period stated week. I'm further intrigued as to why they decided that my address was incorrect, why there was no useful response from their support email address within a week, and why they then decided that everything was good when I hadn't changed anything.

Anyway, there are now ads up on DoW2DB, and I'm interested in seeing what happens as a result.