Sneaky Adsense in Free Wordpress theme

[JerseyGirl]

So... I downloaded what I thought was a pretty sweet magazine-style theme, for free, and was beginning to customize it. When I switched over to "view" to see how everything was looking I noticed a line of adsense ads in the top. I didn't recall uploading the adsense plugin with this one so I investigated some more and, after viewing the source, realized it was the designers pub #!

Is this standard practice? Offering a free theme and then sneakily including your adsense publisher code?

FYI to other newbs- make sure to check your code out thoroughly before publishing, esp. on "free" themes.

 

[interwebmarketr]

Out of the few dozen themes I've looked at, one had an Adsense Google Search box. It seems pretty rare but I guess people occasionally do it.

 

[abhorrent]

A lot of the "adsense ready" themes have the designers ads in them.
Usually the read me file will say "replace my pub ID with yours" or something similar.

They do it so you can see how it looks in the demo (if they have one) and leave it there because it makes it easier for people who don't know how to code. They just change the ID and they're set. Otherwise they get a million emails ("How do I get my ads in the theme like in your demo?")..

I'm sure they hope that some people will forget to remove or change the ID but I don't think there's anything too sneaky going on.

 

[spyderman4g63]

I haven't ran into this yet. My opinion is if you are giving away your work for free why not try to monetize it? I was actually thinking of creating some free themes just for the back links. I never though of replacing replacing the search box in one of those with adsense or even adding ad sense units and creating an "adsense ready template". Noting sneaky about any of that. It's easy enough for us to remove or replace with our own ads.

 

[1nspire]

Its no bid deal really. Just delete or add your pub#. If you really like the theme just leave it for a month then switch to your pub# later if you want to tip the designer.

 

[Anarkist]

A lot of the "adsense ready" themes have the designers ads in them.
Usually the read me file will say "replace my pub ID with yours" or something similar.

They do it so you can see how it looks in the demo (if they have one) and leave it there because it makes it easier for people who don't know how to code. They just change the ID and they're set. Otherwise they get a million emails ("How do I get my ads in the theme like in your demo?")..

I'm sure they hope that some people will forget to remove or change the ID but I don't think there's anything too sneaky going on.

Perfectly summed up. +rep!