Can Google AdSense be approved and run on a creative site with original wallpaper art and little text content?

Question

I like to make creative images like on happy new year and other topics. It's a fun thing to do.

I had a WordPress blog and I used to get a lot of visitors: once it hit 10,000 a day. So I applied for Google AdSense. I got rejected and the reason they mentioned was "Too little content". At that time my blog had 200 creative wallpapers created by me.

Then I purchased a domain name and set up my website on that and now I have a big collection. I want to apply for AdSense so I Googled and found many helpful articles about what to include and what not to. I made those changes but there is one particular thing that I am seriously confused about.

Everywhere says "content is king". You should have 400+ word articles. But I don't write. My website does not contain written articles. It has creative wallpapers which can be used commercially or non-commercially.

When Google rejected my blog for too little content, do they mean that only 200 wallpapers is not enough and I should include more? Is it saying that I should write articles on each wallpaper or post like 400+ words?

Answer 1

AdSense can work on a site with wallpaper images provided that:

• There is enough text describing each image to properly trigger the ads. AdSense works by matching the text on the page to ads. It can't match based on the images themselves. 400 words seems unnecessary for this purpose, but I would recommend at least a couple sentences that contain a full description of the content.
• All the works are original. It is against AdSense policies to show AdSense on pages with copyright violations.
• There is sufficient content. I've seen a recommendation for 50 pages content for approval. 200 wallpapers would seem to meet this guideline, however if they say you need more content, you would need to post more wallpapers more before applying again.
• There are no risqué wallpapers. Google doesn't even want the ads displayed on the same page as a swimsuit model.

All the other common reasons AdSense disapproval also apply:

• You must have owned your site for a year (in most countries)
• Your site must be in good working order with no error pages clickable from the home page
• You must have a privacy policy that discloses the use of cookies

Answer 2

I just took a few minutes and looked at your website – here's some thoughts about possible problems that your site may face:

• You say there is over 200 wallpaper pictures on your website – but the stats box on your website says there is currently only 73 images online? But that should actually not be a problem.
• There are many empty categories on your website ("3d arts", "christmas", "Creative Graphics", "Fantasy", "Funny", etc.) – google does not like collections of empty categories at all! These pages will either look like duplicate or even corrupt content.
• Each image comes in 30-40 different resolutions – but simply squeezing an image is not really offering a different resolution. ANd since you offer each resolution on a different page, for google these sub-pages will also look like duplicate content.
• Last but not least: every search engine can only crawl whatever content is there – and since search engines are not good in interpreting images, they rely mostly on the text that they find. And especially google adsense relies on text because the algorythm first tries to match appropriate ads to the site's context. On your pages the only "text" that can be found is the title of the image, one line of text and the alt-tag (which is identical to the title). That's not enough.

So yes: I would also say that there is probably just not enough real or original content for a search engine (or respectively google adsense).

PS: and by the way: copying / reassembling other people's art work could also be/become a problem (see also https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9892?hl=en)