As Tim Bourquin said, it was an anonymous comment from a site reader.

And after looking at our site stats this \\"hate mail\\" visitor spent only 20 seconds on our site, clicked on one article, and then made the statement to us on our \\"contact us\\" form… making a claim about the quaity our content — which is untrue..

You could say that this was his/her first impression of our site (that others could have if they see Adsense ads), but you cannot take it too seriously with this person\\\’s whopping claim about our content quality if they only visited one article.

(You have to love web analytics that can track this stuff!…but.. we take all visitor comments very seriously).

We are in a niche — but a large one — of US federal employees and retirees…. it\\\’s a niche of milllions — that not many publishers will touch.

I agree with Anne — in general there\\\’s a lot of sites out there that use Adsense that have \\"crap\\" content that can hurt your brand.

Outside of the branding issue Anne described, moneitizing a free or hybrid content site via Adsense is not for everyone.

It can be dangerous.

What we have watched is the true \\"relevance\\" of the Adsense ads appearing. For us (being in the financial, retirement, etc. content arena), the Adsense content has proven fairly reliable — which has, in result, been very profitable.

But as Anne said, we are not hanging our hat on this revenue model.

So in reality, it is probably an indication that Scott is doing everything right! No morons emailing usually means no traffic at all, so it’s a good thing.

That said, the basic rule is to not reply, delete their email and keep moving ahead. Anyone who has the time to write such an email isn’t worth listening to anyway.