“… publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. … And with AdSense, you’ll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. … For publishers who are not yet placing ads in their feeds, any publisher who meets the requirements to join the AdSense program will also be able to use AdSense for feeds. You will be able to manage your feed ad units directly from AdSense Setup tab, and track performance right on the AdSense Report tab. …”

“While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://…. Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to c1ick on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “c1ick the ads,” “support our sponsors,” “visit these recommended links,” or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. …”

We can only guess that our post had too many occurrences of the word c1ick and that this drew the bot’s attention. The bot wants us to change the post and warned “I’ll be back”.

“Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.”

We sympathize with the bot. Google’s AdSense policy is reasonable and for the greater good. It’s surely a challenging problem to automatically detect possible violations of it and having a person screen them all probably an expensive solution. We’ve replied to the email, of course, asking a person to look and verify that we are following the policy. But we’ve not heard back and the clock is ticking. We may have to de-c1ickify the post.

UPDATE (5 Aug): We did hear back from the Google AdSense team and our interpretation of the problem was wrong.