What exactly Indicast is doing wrong?

Indicast is an Indian podcast, which is getting quite a buzz these days and is getting quite popular amongst the Indian bloggers. Amit Ranjan from WebYantra (I call him Michael Arrington of Indian Startups) has also profiled Indicast and that made me curious, to know more about Indicast. Indicast is multi-person podcast and run by two friends Aditya and Abhishek. They both stress on the point that they are no expert on news related media and that they want to deliver the news without any sugar coating.

What’s in favour of Indicast?

• Indicast reported it to Amit Ranjan that it received approximately 100,000 downloads and has been profiled by many top Indian bloggers.
• Indicast has featured on BBC and NDTV India (popular Indian news channel).

Where they’ve gone wrong ?

It seems that Indicast is monetizing through Google Adsense, now I’m not saying that it is bad to monetize through Google Adsense (Rather, it is the best way to monetize your blogs & podcasts) but what I want to stress upon is that they have violated the policy of Google Adsense and that may lead to problems for them in future.

If you notice on their podcast (Click on the images to get a better picture), you’ll find that the places where they’ve put the Adsense, they’ve written CLICK SUPPORT in those boxes. This means that if you will click on those links then you’ll be supporting Indicast. Now, this is against Google Adsense’s policy and this section of the policy confirms that too :

May not encourage users to click the Google ads by using phrases such as “click the ads,” “support us,” “visit these links,” or other similar language.

(Click on the image to see the bigger picture and then notice the highlighted portion in red.)

So, if they are planning to monetize through Google Adsense or may be Google Audio ads in future then they must read the policies properly otherwise, it will be difficult for them to continue and the world might get deprived of listening to such a nice and interesting podcast.

Technorati : Google Adsense, ReviewSaurus, theindicast