I'd define PayPalism as businesses with a significantly risk of fraud as a result of conducting financial activities and transactions with "online" customers.
Such businesses take huge risks since they are dealing with money and their bad phenomenons (tax evasion, credit-card/identity abuse, money laundry) without having real face-to-face contact and customer identification. Therefore, in order to stay competitive and manage their risk, they have in their agreements termination clauses which enable them to disable suspicious accounts unilaterally without providing explanations.
For both AdSense and PayPal, sustainable competition at feature-parity failed to appear. There aren't any agencies that allow a guy with only a few thousand impressions per month to earn a buck with a pay-per-click model, or any banks that allow you to open an account with them just by providing an email address. Which leads me to believe that the account closures are just part of the business model assumption which allows PayPalism corporations to manage their risk and survive.
But maybe I'm wrong and something better will emerge. The trick is to improve interactions with legitimate accounts while keeping abuse detection algorithms secret. Which might be a very, very difficult problem to solve...
I'd simply say that you're doing business with a computer program, not a human being, because that's, basically, the root of it.
And people are learning to adapt on both sides: e.g. people who sweep out their PayPal account constantly. Or those who have learned that you can hose a competitor if you make the programs think they're a fraudulent business.
Damn.. that's a disheartening story. Hope this article gets enough publicity to get Google's hound dogs on the trail, maybe get him some of his earnings back.. AT LEAST re-instate his youtube adsenes account.
Bad PR for google.. too bad you hear stories like this all the time.
I'm a big fan of the "let's find an algorithmic solution" approach to everything (because it scales), but if the so called specialists (still assuming they are human specialists) are already involved, would it have hurt to send a little more information about the issue that just a link to the FAQ? You know, the human factor...
Oh the human factor! Somehow that seems to be completely missing when dealing with anything Adsense. I run a 2 year old startup in the domain of self-publishing. Tried signing up for an Adsense account. Even after multiple rounds of back and forth, I couldn't get any concrete answer about exactly which rules our site was violating. They just kept sending link to the same FAQ. Very frustrating. Fortunately, our business model is not advertising, so it didn't matter much.
I wonder how the customer service is going to be now that they are entering e-commerce space.
It's too bad what happened to him and it doesn't seem fair in this context, but shouldn't there be a reasonable expectation that people who are relying on advertising revenue from google at least read the terms of service? I know it's something that I would make sure I was aware of.
I understand your point, but have you ever actually tried to read the terms is service of any multi-thousand line legal document written in legalese. You are obviously in a way right, but for Google (and other companies) to purposely obfuscate the process does more harm.
Not for every piece of software I install on my computer, but if I'm doing it for work or if its important like an OS or a cellphone plan I do try to read the entire document. Its really not that bad if you're willing to take a few minutes and they aren't written purposefully to be hard to understand - just to be legally precise.
I don't see how that would have helped him. After having his lawyer review the terms of service (which is probably superior to reading it for himself), apparently he's concluded that there's nothing he could have done to prevent this from happening. He was using Youtube, and that limits his ability to shop around for better terms of service for ads.
It's not too much ad revenue. It's suspicious ad revenue. He had 6% CTR, which is high, and also seemed to encourage his visitors click, at least to some extent.
It's not clear to what extent he encouraged clicks, but asking visitors to click your ads is like asking for your account to be terminated.
My visitors were usually smart and probably figured out on their own (since many of them had blogs - and AdSense accounts - themselves) that clicking on banners meant supporting the site.
Too bad Google shoots first and never asks any question.
It's really comfortable to live in a space without meaningful competition.
If I were an advertiser, why would I want to advertise on your site, if I know that visitors are supporting you by clicking but have no intention of converting? I care about the effectiveness of my ads. They are far less effective if visitors do this.
Ultimately the advertisers are paying for your AdSense income. It may not be your fault, but if you're providing less value to the advertiser, then it seems only fair that you don't participate, since your participation harms the whole market.
This is undeniably a problem with the current AdSense business model, but we all know this, choose to participate and accept the risk.
It would be wonderful if advertisers could pipe conversion rates back into Google so that ads would gravitate towards sites that generated greater conversion rates. This way, sites that have fans that decrease conversion rates will naturally sink to the bottom of the pile without much effort and would bubble up as soon as the behavior changes and conversion rates improve.
It seems a natural solution to the problem. Would you be able to pipe back conversion rates based on where the banner was shown?
That's pretty easy to do if they're using Google Analytics. It integrates with AdWords very well, and can track conversion rates (not just clicks) on their site for each ad.
Heck. If this data would be piped back to me, I would be able to target content towards whatever brought higher conversions and thus higher value for advertisers.
Actually the moral is "don't have too high of a click through rate". In the article he admits he told the viewers to click on the ads to get money to him from advertisers (violating the ToS). The viewers liked him and likely committed the click fraud for him. The money was returned to the advertisers.
What I got out of it was to open up independent Adsense accounts for different websites. If Google decides to shut one down, at least the others won't be affected.
This. My first thought was "why didn't he use separate accounts?" Of course the mailing address for the checks would be the same. So then get multiple P.O. Boxes. Then I think they require a phone number too? I'm sure Google has some employee who has thought of this.
Also wouldn't surprise me if one person having multiple AdSense accounts is a violation of their terms.
I'm sure there are restrictions for this, but at that kind of income it doesn't make sense not to spend a few hundred dollars and open up an LLC or something for at least the YouTube account.
I probably wouldn't have bothered with it until reading this, but I always hear every investment should be done with a separate entity and this seems to be no different.
I heard that this actually works. I've seen this advice over the internet: If your account is suspended just open another one. You have much higher probability of using it that getting the original working again.
The AdSense agreement specifically prohibits you from doing this. Of course, you might not get caught, but from a legal standpoint it's a Prohibited Use.
Yes. I think the problem is that people don't really understand Adsense. They think they are "earning" money by placing ads on their sites. In reality they are outsourcing the placing of ads on their sites to Google, who manages the customer relationships with advertisers and shares a portion of the revenue with the site owner as an incentive. In agreeing to outsource the ads and relationships, site owners put themselves at the mercy of Google, which has a responsibility first and foremost to its paying customers, i.e. the advertisers.
Still, helping non-compliant site owners into compliance would create greater revenue opportunities and a healthier market for media buyers and sellers alike, as well as a better environment for the middleman.
I agree there is little understanding by some of how Adsense "works" and how $ from an advertiser ends up in a check to you from Google. Most people don't care however anyone running a business off of Adsense should know in detail how they work or you risk getting your business cut off like this. As others have said diversification of revenue is important especially if you don't have confidence in how the system works - example the stock market.
If you are releasing one or a few videos, revenue from Adsense is just about the only game in town. However if you have enough content that can survive outside of YouTube you create an opportunity to work directly with advertisers. Many video podcasters have moved this way, not hosting videos on Youtube and owning the ad relationships and revenue.
Relying on Google, or any other single source, for your income is the same as having an employer. This is just as true whether you run a Youtube channel or have a multimillion dollar B2B business with only one client (aka "boss").
Being in the content game is the easy part of the equation; ad sales is the hard part. You can take the easy road and join a network, making pennies on the dollar and potentially getting "sacked" by an algorithm, or you can pound the pavement and sell some ads to people. They're more profitable, you diversify your income, but it's not easy.
Put AdSense on your site (if you haven't already been banned) and look at what ads are being displayed. Then, go and approach those advertisers directly.
For pricing, decide how you want to get paid. You have 3 basic choices: CPM (per 1000 ad/page views), CPC (per click) and CPA (per action, i.e. someone clicks your ad and then buys something from that site). The easiest for you will be CPM. So, set your prices low, like at $2 per 1000 ad views. Raise prices based on demand. My best piece of advice is that you will not get rich from one site. You need to have several websites making a few bucks a day to make a living.
Also, those advertisers are most likely advertising on other ad platforms as well. AdSense is king of CPC, but other sites specialize in CPM and CPA. Check out Commision Junction to get some ideas. There are many ad networks out there. And, if you want to run your own ad network, there is open source software to help you setup and manage that too.
Re: fair prices - Totally depends on your content, your market, and how targeted you are to the advertiser's audience. There are plenty of sub-$1 CPM display ads, and I've been a part of buying $170 CPM ads. But you should only worry about this only after you have sold out your ad inventory. Anything is better than nothing.
He does mention this though - "I did get the odd subscriber sending me an email saying that he had clicked loads of adverts. This is called demon clicking. I would reply that I would prefer them to only click on adverts they were interested in."
And then there is reference in the article to another commenter mentioning the same in the comments which he then edited to remove.
Sounds like there was at least a reason to suspect - sad if the users did that on their own and he had to suffer due to their actions but I find it hard to believe strangers will do this for making another stranger money.
I find it hard to believe strangers will do this for making another stranger money.
To an extent, HN readers click on "rate my startup" links out of the goodness of their hearts. In any small, tight-knit community (like sailing, apparently), members of that community will try to help each other out, even if they don't actually know one another.
Difference is the effort - one click on rate my startup once is different from watching the videos again and again and clicking several links. It requires more motivation than just helping each other out without too much pain to yourself.
For as many articles that there are about how great, smart, [fill in another positive adjective] Google is, I'm surprised that no news source has pointed out the ridiculous behavior of Google.
Who else would you work with (i.e., display advertising for) without having the ability to speak to someone by telephone when a difficult situation has occurred? None of our customers would tolerate this -- why do we continue to allow Google to get away with it?
I'm not saying this author is right or deserving of the revenue (I don't have all the details or facts), but what is clear is that he has:
1. Earned Google a good bit of revenue
2. Appears earnest
3. Deserves to interact with a real human in a real way (not by automated emails without the ability to reply)
Why aren't more people appalled by Google's actions and the way they treat their partners?!
Except, Google would then be in the customer service business. I’m not saying they couldn’t throw resources against that endeavor, but think of the time waste of being on the phone vs. having automated responses based on the keywords in someone’s complaint. Cuts down on time/cost from their POV. Not justifying what Google did, just sayin.
It's maddening though in a time when people -- one would hope -- would have access to better customer service, yet, it feels things are as bad as ever. It’s hard enough to reach someone on an e-commerce site, forget social networks (1-800-FACEBOOK ain’t happening anytime soon). Little different scenario in this case, but you get the gist.
The only time they seem to make it easy to reach out to a real person is when you need/want to buy something.
As an analogy, if you're a one-person developer, your problem is usually that you don't have enough users. You can participate in forum discussions with users of your software, fix bugs within days, send a personalized thank you e-mail for every purchase, all to provide exceptional level of service to grow word of mouth and get more customers. When you get to the size of Microsoft, that won't work anymore. Your expensive devs have to separated from users by layer of product management, your support calls cost you serious money and one troublesome buyer can cost you much more than he paid for in software etc.
Google finds itself in the same boat with AdSense. I don't know the exact scale of AdSense but it must be in millions of publishers and thousands of advertisers. Even a small number of people insisting you give them special consideration or explain in detail what exactly did they do wrong will burn incredible amount of support time and money.
It's clear why he was banned from AdSense and yet he wrote an epic post detailing his experience and inventing multiple reasons for why it wasn't so bad. Do you think that if someone at Google sent him a personal note explaining why he was banned, he would just say "oh, I get it now, you were so totally justified in terminating my account". No, he would keep badgering Google until they finally gave up responding and he would end up writing the same epic post, this time quoting extensively his correspondence with heartless Google employee who was not swayed by his obviously correct arguments.
Someone arguing with Google to not suspend their account has all the incentive to keep badgering Google until Google says "this is a final decision".
Google can't win this battle and they do the best anyone can do at that scale.
> Google can't win this battle and they do the best anyone can do at that scale.
I agree right up to this point.
The economics of online advertising are extremely harsh when you add up the attention span of online users, the ease of fraud, and the feedback available to advertisers. It's a sea change that people need to come to terms with one way or another.
However the level to which Google dehumanizes publishers is quite likely to bite them in the ass. Enough of these articles and their publisher base will eventually shrink and open the door the competition. Now obviously the competition will not be able to change the economics, but PR is not Google's forté, and it's possible to do a much better job handling these incidents without any change in the economics.
AdWords versus Click Farmers has a striking resemblance to the prisoner's dilemma, where the only winning strategy is punishment followed by forgiveness.
Oh yes, I was also running little blocks of adverts provided by Adsense and, yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers – all of whom were interested in selling stuff to sailors.
...long story...
In the end it was click-fraud-ish.
There's a huge fear for those dependent on google adsense that they will get terminated out of the blue like this. The problem is, there's no great alternative. But instructing your visitors in some way to click on your ads does cross the line.
You are completely right- I think the general feeling is that Google needs to do a better job of communicating that to content creators. This guy clearly didn't realize the extent of the damage, and said he would return adsense revenue from the website. They could fairly disable adsense on the website, but knocking the YouTube revenue just seems unnecessary after giving a very stern warning. People find it troubling that a monolithic algorithmic arbiter makes these decision that change people's lives
I would suggest a "three strikes" approach. The program warns you (because it may not be your fault) then the program blocks you for, say, 30 days and then you are banned.
Disclaimer: I was banned from AdSense too and I still don't know what happened. Since my site had very low traffic, I suspect even one well meaning fan could clickfraud me into nonexistence.
How about exponentially increasing ban times, instead of a life-time ban after the third strike? (Perhaps with even a cooling off period, if you behave well for some time.)
The only way to do that would be for a competitor to implement it and begin gaining traction because of it. Right now, the cost of the wrongfully terminated is less than the cost of wrongfully terminating them and probably always will be unless Google starts loosing people afraid of being wrongfully terminated. That number becomes much larger.
Want to incentivize Google? Convince Bing to implement it and see if Adsense customers convert as a result. If I felt Bing was treating their customers/vendors (ads is a really weird relationship :) better, I would consider using it (since as a search product it has approached Google pretty close).
The problem is that Google's customer is not the site that carries the banners, but the advertiser who wants their banners shown. Unless those gravitate towards an ad network that coincidentally provides better service to site owners, those folks are doubly screwed.
I won't weigh in on this specific incident because I'm not familiar with the details, plus it's on the ads side, not the search quality side.
But I can weigh in on the "make the action exponential" idea. Regarding the steps that the webspam team takes, we take stronger and stronger action as we see repeated violations or violations with more willful or damaging intent.
Hidden text might result in a 30 day removal, for instance (and the site can always remove the hidden text and do a reconsideration request before the 30 days is up, of course). But if we see the site repeatedly violating our guidelines or doing worse stuff, then the action is stronger.
Do you inform people of that? I mean, do you inform people that they will be removed for 30 days and unless they put things right they will be banned for longer?
Or do you remove them and not tell them at all, leaving them in the dark completley?
Great question, Andrew. We typically do inform people they'll be removed for hidden text for 30 days. We also tell people how to file a reconsideration request to come back in sooner. I did the query ["hidden text" 30 days reconsideration request] and here's an example email from the #1 result: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020315.html
You can read the whole message that we send, but the relevant part would be "In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.
We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-.... When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=e... to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration."
As infractions get more serious and we believe that the SEO/site owner is more willful, we give less information to the people who do spammier things.
Wow maybe this could be a black hat strategy. Find a target and click fraud them until they get banned. Maybe he was a victim of this method. If I relied on Ad-sense, I would be concerned about this.
> But instructing your visitors in some way to click on your ads does cross the line.
If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those.
Outright, criminal fraud is one thing, but I would argue that it's unethical to hold up the funds he has already accrued. Sure, cut him off, but perhaps it's not the best idea to rely on the good intentions of people when you offer cash for clicks.
> If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those.
No, he didn't. A "small botnet" or Tor is not particularly useful to force you to violate the Adsense ToS by telling your visitors to click on your ads.
I think his point is that, if invalid clicks is all it takes for an adsense publisher to get banned, then there is nothing to stop your competition from going onto your site and clicking a lot of your ads or get a botnet to do it and get you banned.
If it is a mere algorithm, then it is not unforeseeable, that, due to no fault of your own whatever, but malice of competitors, you can get banned, though, in these cases, I think there would be a good legal argument, not least because the google contract you sign up to is not entirely recognised by some courts, but replaced in many instances by what is or seems reasonable, as, when you sign up to the contract you have no choice but to sign up, thus, there is no equal bargaining power.
Except in that particular case that's not what happened. He admits he was enticing users to click ads which is clearly against AdSense rules.
I'm sure the fraud detection system is not perfect but in this case it actually worked as designed. Yay for Google, boo for people who try to take advantage of the system.
1) fraudulent clicks that could be generated by a botnet
2) instructions on the site itself that you have control over telling your visitors to click on ads to make you more money.
I don't want to come across as defending google on this. They could use a lot more hands on customer service. This sort of sudden termination is scary and sucks. I'm just pointing out, there is unjustified termination (which also happens) and termination based on willful fraud.
He knows what he did was wrong. He admits as much in his magnum opus. Just not wrong enough to be banned from AdSense.
I know he's wrong and I know exactly what he did wrong: he enticed visitors to his website to click on ads so that he makes more money at the expense of advertisers. You cannot do it for reasons that are both obvious and clearly speelled in AdSense agreement.
He is unwilling to correct the problem. He's even unwilling to admit there is a problem - his whole argument to favor theory of cruel and unusual treatment from Google is based on his fundamental belief that he really did nothing wrong. Plus irrelevant personal details designed to trigger sympathy for him, as a person, and detract attention away from the facts of what he did.
I wonder if the money is withheld because it'll be returned to the advertisers - or whether Google actually keeps it. I'd be surprised if Google charged the advertisers for traffic that it detected to be fraudulent.
If a sailor buys a sailing book by entering Amazon via my website, I get a 5 per cent referral fee. If some-one spends $200 on a Kindle or a camera, [they] get their next three month s subscription for free.
That's definitely abuse of Amazon's affiliate program and crosses the line from click-fraud-ish to full blown criminal fraud. Aside from being against the terms of their scheme, his clear intention is to induce site visitors to make planned purchases through his affiliate links, something that is obviously completely contrary to the spirit of his agreement with Amazon.
The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely scraping by. By cutting him off, Google is losing revenue to protect the integrity of their advertising marketplace. They're doing the decent thing by their advertisers in taking a cheat out of the system. I wholeheartedly support Google in their actions.
While Google's customers ARE the advertisers and their first priority is to make sure they are protected, Google would sit up and do something if more website PUBLISHERS would complain. It's a business.
However, as a practical issue, I fail to see any practical reason to disable the guy's revenue from YouTube videos, based on clicks from an unrelated site. Just stop counting the clicks on the site, Google!
He has control over those youtube videos, he should take them down, create all new accounts with his wifes information and then put up the truck videos and pretty soon youtube will put him back into advertising mix. For his other site, if I were him I would run Adbrite.com ads instead of Adwords ads.
> However, as a practical issue, I fail to see any practical reason to disable the guy's revenue from YouTube videos . . .
Really? I have thought about it for about two minutes and came up with several.
1. Google might assume that someone who has committed click fraud in the past might do so again, and preemptively remove other facets of that person's ability to harm the system.
2. Google might want to discourage people from committing piecemeal fraud by ensuring them that there is no way to risk just part of your account with Google. By disabling all of this guy's ability to make money from Google, they are sending the signal, "Hey, don't think you can pull a fast one and still keep any part of your business with us, even if the site is unrelated."
3. Maybe there was some undisclosed badness going on with the Youtube account that we are not seeing in the account given in this article.
I don't see anything in Amazon's terms about what you call "full blown criminal fraud" and I would imagine it is actually encouraged by Amazon. Google is paying for clicks, whereas Amazon is only paying for actual sales.
Amazon would benefit from that message being on every site on the internet. It's advertising for them and letting people know they can help their favorite sites adds an extra incentive to sway people to order stuff.
Agreed, I see many sites even for big charities regularly saying "when you shop Amazon, do so from here." Amazon could stop that in a hurry. They don't.
The open-source video aggregator Miro actually has a Firefox extension that automatically appends Miro's affiliate code if there wasn't already one on the link you followed to Amazon. This is done pretty obviously so I assume that Amazon is aware of it and allows it.
I don't see anything even slightly fraudulent about saying, "Amazon pays us commission on sales made with our affiliate code attached, please buy expensive things there", and I don't see how that's bad for anyone.
Yep, paying a commission for making sure that an intended purchase is made at your site is better than risking losing it to the price comparison lottery; at worst they make a slightly lower profit per sale.
eCommerce vendors are even happy to partner with sites like Quidco that openly offer cashback rewards for people making purchases via their affiliate links.
The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated
his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the
fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be
just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely
scraping by.
That's unnecessarily harsh. The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind: by endorsing the ads that were being displayed, he would get more money, but they would get more, serious, traffic. Suppose he had a private contract with an advertiser. Then that advertiser would applaud him saying 'please visit companyX: they sell stuff you may very well want to buy from them and they support this site'. There is no reason to suppose the intention was different in this case.
It seems you can display Google's ads, but should never comment on them in any way, not even to say 'Gosh, I really like how they so accurately list companyA, companyB and companyC as relevant for my site.' The first rule of using AdSense is, you don't talk about AdSense?
It might seem that way to you but it's not true. You can talk about AdSense all you want, as you and many others did commenting on this story.
What you cannot do, for obvious reasons, is to entice people to click on ads. It doesn't matter how subtle the encouragement is, how good are your intentions, how many kids you still have to support, how many kittens you saved from certain death. It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement and violating that agreement gets you banned from AdSense.
I'm also making money from AdSense and the simple reality is that if Google doesn't take steps to limit the kind of click fraud that this guy openly, if very verbosely, admits to, it'll hurt everyone else who's not matching it and in the long term will hurt everyone, period, because there will be less money in the ecosystem if ad publishers feel ripped off.
It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think
about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement
Laws are also both obvious and spelled clearly. Nevertheless we need judges to interpret them according to each situation. Even with those judges in place, we still accept that some people will be punished for moral behavior, while others will walk free for immoral behavior, because a law cannot possibly cover every situation under which it will apply.
In this case, it seems to be the regrettable situation where someone is being punished for moral behavior. Regrettable, but perhaps unavoidable. However, that's as far as you should be willing to go. Trying to justify Google's actions by accusing the one that was punished of immoral behavior is not necessary and not warranted.
it seems to be the regrettable situation where someone is being punished for moral behavior
Someone is being held accountable for a contract they willingly entered. The morality of the behavior is not at issue - moral or not they legally agreed not to do it. The rest, IMO, is hand waving.
The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind
That may be what he has in mind, but experience shows that isn't what happens. Instead you get a situation where people with no interest whatsoever in purchasing anything click the link just to help out the website they are interested in. Just because the traffic comes from the targeted demographic doesn't mean it's actually serious.
I'm not saying that Google did an excellent job of handling this situation. It amazes me that they think it's appropriate to revoke thousands of dollars in earnings without (usually) providing someone to talk to. That said, asking people to click links on your site is bound to invite well-meaning individuals to click on ads they have no intent of following, which is practically the definition of click-fraud.
Important to note - Google revoked their _own_ earnings as well. They treated all the money as tainted and returned it to advertisers. After having (carefully) read the (entire) story, I would have done the same thing. This wasn't really a grey-line issue - the guy told his readers to click on ads. That's pretty much a Top-3 way to get kicked out of adsense.
Well, if the author is in contact with the advertiser directly and are selling impression instead of clicks, then why yes, of course the advertiser would be okay with it. Its like TV hosting the ad of the advertiser for a period of time. If the TV wants to tell people buy the advertiser product, then most of the advertiser wouldn't mind.
If however, say KFC is advertising on the TV, and instead of impression, they are taking a cut whenever someone who watched the TV goes to KFC, then the situation would be very different. Which is the case of Google, where each click has a cost.
My advice to him, instead of depending on Google, just get the advertisers directly and just charge by impression, or at least a fix charge for a period of time. Since there are value in the stuff he is doing, I would believe that there would be advertisers willing to pay anyway, just a matter how much.
The only downside going that way, now he has to do the marketing to potential advertisers as well, as opposed to Google doing it for him previously.
> his clear intention is to induce site visitors to make planned purchases through his affiliate links, something that is obviously completely contrary to the spirit of his agreement with Amazon.
Isn't that what affiliate links are for? Encouraging people to buy something through them.
Many review sites right glistening copy then add an affiliate link. is that against the spirit of the agreement too?
I don't know about "Criminal Fraud" (that seems rather harsh), but it is in violation of the Amazon Program Participation requirements:
"14. You will not offer any person or entity any consideration or incentive (including any money, rebate, discount, points, donation to charity or other organization, or other benefit) for using Special Links (e.g., by implementing any “rewards” or loyalty program that incentivizes persons or entities to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links). "
This guy really managed to find a lot of ways to shoot himself in the foot.
a) Amazon have not cut him off (and I hope someone will draw the risk you highlight to his attention before they do)
b) there's no incentive offered to use the links in the sense of just visiting Amazon. There's an incentive offered to people who make a purchase there, which is an entirely separate act. Now 'visiting' is only offered as an example and he probably is violating the agreement by giving subscription discounts on some purchases, but it's an easy misunderstanding to make, especially given that it's not the central plank of his business model or anything like it.
Ironically, his forthright explanation of how his business model supports a positive interpretation of his motives, because he doesn't even seem to understand the potential pitfalls of what he's doing. If he were the scammer than some are suggesting, it would not be in his interest to expose his methods.
I agree with you that he broke the spirit of Google AdSense CPC program.
But Amazon's affiliate program is different.
It's OK to incentivize affiliate purchases -- at the end your users are paying real $$$.
Doesn't everyone on the internet already know that website operators receive revenue from visitors clicking on ads? I don't comprehend the underlying premise that ad-clickers are supposed to be ignorant of how internet advertising works.
The sort of fraud ad brokers want to avoid is 'www.fraud-u-lent.com: Hey visitors! click on 10 of these ads and get FREE warez/porn/iPad/car for every 10 clix!!'
On the other hand, there's a legitimate conversation that goes along the lines of '[niche site] is great! how do you manage to provide us with so much great content for our [niche hobby]?' 'Oh thanks, I have been a [niche hobbyist] for 20 years, and accumulated a lot of [niche content/skill]. Also those ads at the side of the page help support the project so you can enjoy it for free.'
The second is technically violating any ad agreement that prohibits click invitations, but in a vastly different way from the first example. An overly mechanical or aggressive interpretation is throwing the baby out with the bath water, and if it becomes too common it will become (or perhaps already is) an opportunity for a competitor.
Clearly not everyone on the internet acts on that knowledge which is why frequently asking people visiting your website to click on ads does increase the number of (unfortunately worthless to the advertiser) clicks.
Google doesn't prevent you from discussing how AdSense works in general.
What you cannot do is to specifically ask people to click on ads on your website.
The underlaying premise is not that people are ignorant but that they will do the things you ask them to do.
They want the website itself to NOT suggest in any way that people should click on AdSense ads. They want people to do it naturally, of their own accord - so their algorithms (googles) can handle ad placement and whatnot.
It's not the same as me buying an ad on your site and encouraing traffic.. it's not an affiliate sales program.. it's a very specific advertising setup that very clearly states you are not to encourage people to click on the ads.
I can not agree. There is an enormous difference between click-farming and a courteous 'please support this site by considering the fine offerings of my advertisers.' Also, to cut off all his YouTube income because of a misreading of his pitch on a tiny subscription-driven site is BS - there's no sign that he abused YouTube in any way.
I appreciate that a more responsive feedback loop can be exploited by bad guys as easily as it can support good guys, but the approach Google has taken creates a greater incentive for the guy to pull his old material and create a new online identity than it does for him to correct the minor flaw in his marketing. It's easy to say 'don't ever encourage users to click on ads,' but half the appeal of niche sites like this to members is being able to have conversational contact with an individual whose work is especially admirable, or through which the member can live vicariously.
What's happening here is that a legitimate honest business model (subscriber sales for niche content, with a minor secondary revenue stream from ads) is being punished because of Google's inability to differentiate it from a dishonest business model. The huge fear you describe is a reflection of both the asymmetry between Google and the small advertiser, and of the difficulty in understanding exactly what behavior is in or out. Not everyone finds those contracts easy to read or understand, and Google is actually raising barriers to entry if it enforces them too rigidly and giving greater incentive to the black hats than the white hats. I strongly suspect that this is a limiting factor on Google's own revenue, which is stuck on a local maximum because Google itself is has a much lower tolerance for information asymmetry than it demands of its content providers.
His practice is a clear case of click fraud and his above-normal click-through rates demonstrate that he was successful in that fraudulent behavior.
Google correctly identified his business as dishonest and terminated his account per agreement that the guy signed when he started using AdSense.
You try to make a case for Google trying to determine shades of gray, but it's a non-scalable, slippery slope.
The current rule is crystal clear and simple: don't encourage users to click on ads they otherwise wouldn't. By definition every such click is fraudulent because the user wouldn't otherwise perform it.
Google (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot implement more subtle rules (that weight factors like how many times someone did it, how often does he do it, how subtle the encouragement is, how many kids he has to support) in a scalable way.
Google couldn't even apply more subtle rules in a consistent way, giving fraudsters even more weapon in what is a PR game (take all the ample, emotional justification from the above post AND allow that fraudster to point to other people who are doing similar things but Google hasn't taken action against them because some fallible person applied a different subtle standard for what fraud is than some other fallible person).
As this thread demonstrates, there's plenty of people willing to sympathise with the fraudster despite clear, self-admitted evidence of wrongdoing based purely on his self-professed (hence extremely biased) version of how good of a person he is and how good intentions were and how badly he was treated by big, cold Google. Emotion can trump facts.
Why? How far from "willful intent" is "willful ignorance"? Especially in the face of precisely, unquestionably violating the very first agreement checkbox of a contract?[1] If you can even claim ignorance, that is; they were informed. That's kind of the point of contracts.
"Emotion can trump facts". I think the guy's point is, emotion should sometimes trump facts. No Google human was involved. A big chunk of the internet economy is controlled by a heartless robot who can't tell the difference between a middle ages sailor guy going a little over the line, and dedicated click fraud. Shit, even the IRS lets you explain to a human and maybe get a second chance.
Given how long this went on, I'd be willing to bet that an advertiser noticed the abnormally high referrals + abnormally high bounce rate, and complained to Google. The whole "Google's impersonal algorithm did this to me" stance is entirely a guess, because they explicitly don't disclose what was detected nor how it was detected.
Heck, I'd bet an algorithm would've caught it (or at least flagged it, caused a review, and had it confirmed) a loooong time ago. Which would've cut off his income while it was smaller. A smooth-functioning, impersonal algorithm may have been preferable in this case.
It's a peculiarity of AdSense that turns what would normally be helpful behavior (please check out my advertisers -- they have really good stuff I personally recommend) into "fraudulent" behavior. The reason is, of course, that the site author has zero input or control over the contents of the AdSense boxes, and as such can't really recommend what's in there. You can _hope_ that what's in the box is a relevant ad for your readers, but you really don't have any way of knowing.
Google could provide a kind of back-and-forth here, to restore the ability of a site author to provide a testimonial for a particular advertiser. An author would have to provide a (short and limited) list of sites and testimonial copy for each one.
A sailing site could then, for a particular sailcloth manufacturer's ad, provide a short testimonial noting the high quality of the product, etc...and Google could serve up that custom testimonial along with the ad.
The missing part of his article is the exact text of his message to his subscribers re: 'I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers.'
There's a difference between "I support this product and you should check them out" and "click on these ads." Google's ads are targeted and beyond them being about sailing, he doesn't necessarily know what's being shown.
So it's pretty difficult for him to personally recommend particular ads or companies. I'd like to see the exact messaging he sent to his subscribers.
6% CTR implies otherwise. As others have noted, that's not just abnormally high, that's impossibly high for legitimate behavior.
A warning would have been better. But by this point he had already essentially scammed advertisers for tens of thousands of dollars (he mentions $3000 in the last 6 week period).
What would you suggest a middle-man do, if person-X has scammed your clients for tens of thousands of dollars? A polite warning, or cut them off ASAP? And remember that in this case the middle-man is the largest middle-man out there, and deals with billions of interactions.
"Please visit our sponsors" and "please visit our advertisers" are phrases that I've seen very often on the Internet (Google Search has 18m and 750m results for these phrases, respectively.) I'm curious, do many of these sites use a different vendor than AdSense or are breaches of this term quite common?
There's a difference between AdSense scheme and a sponsor or advertiser if they pay a fixed sponsorship fee or fixed fee for the ad.
In that scenario, every additional click, even if of decreasing marginal utility, is a win for the advertiser and the publisher is making them a favor by sending as much traffic as they can.
For Google AdSense and other programs based on pay-per-click scheme, advertiser pays for each click so worthless clicks do cost them money and benefit the publisher. That's why it's fraud. There is a strong incentive for one side (publisher) to take advantage of the other side (advertiser) and if allowed to exist on scale, would harm the whole marketplace.
The phrasing you used suggest fixed scheme. If it is used in the context of pay-per-click scheme, then yes, it does violate the agreement and I doubt there's any pay-per-click scheme that doesn't ban such behavior.
This is somewhat irrelevant. Google says in the TOS to not do that, but they don't ban on that alone. What you get banned for is based on data. Everytime they ban someone, they want enough evidence, so if it ever went to court, they don't look foolish. You can have no effect, or even some when asking people to click. You have to break thresholds to actually get banned. And even if there were some users egregiously 'supporting' the site, the people can overlook that and just deduct from the account. To get automatically banned means you broke some nasty thresholds.
He's generating revenue via a subscription, so that's an alternative to AdSense already (or supplement, as it were). Luckily there are other ad networks, and the ability to sell ads directly (which he is already doing) as a way to generate more income on the website.
As far as the videos on YouTube though, I agree there is not much alternative because of the sheer size and reach of YouTube.
Always remember, Google (by themselves) lives and dies based on original content. Google supplies very little OC (other than perhaps Google Maps). The millions and millions of sites that present themselves at the doorstep of AdSense are seeking a quick and painless way of funding themselves. These same site are providing the OC that supports AdSense (while others provide the advertising spends). Google is the switchboard between the OC and the advertisers. I see no particular impediment (other than Google's size) preventing another from entering the same type of market.
Tough luck. Yes, that might come across as crass, but did they bother reading Google's terms of service? So they will bitch and moan about it, try the appeal process and not a dent will be made in their case.
What it boils down to is: if you rely on those earnings to sustain your business, guard against anything that tosses you into a suspicious category. And that is a moving target as well.
I do empathize with him, as I had to toil through AdSense appeal process, but that means diddly-squat.
Doesn't seem like you have a ton of control over the situation, seeing as the rules as written are almost impossible to break in some manner, the rules are only partially declared, and you cannot police your users who may think they're doing you a favor (note: he did actually discourage his users from clicking).
Heh, that is partially true. Once a person is in his situation, I agree, there isn't much to be done. On the other hand, there are ways to guard against getting into hot water and lack of effort counts against him.
There are unmentioned albeit publicly verified limits or thresholds that a publisher should abide by. It's in the publishers best interest to learn these, consult on what to do before ad-sense is enabled and what to do afterwards.
Seems like part of the problem is that YouTube revenue is tied together to revenue from AdSense for websites, even though the two services are affected by click fraud differently. Now Google is still making money from the author's popular YouTube videos, and he won't see a penny.
The "correct" response would be to pull all his videos from YouTube, move them to a competing service, and write Google to let them know why. Of course, this would unfortunately mean traffic would drop close to zero... (what's the closest competitor to YouTube right now?)
Agreed. I don't know the AdSense agreement at all, but I'd think this is a smart argument for creating separate LLCs (or other business entity) for each of your online endeavors.
Now that his accounts have been suspended, can he even pull the videos from YouTube? He may have to send a dmca takedown notice just to stop YouTube from profiting off of his misery.
As an aside, now that he has been 'sacked' by google, google's making 100% of the advertising revenue from his videos instead of some lower amount. That's very convenient for google.
The Google giveth and The Google taketh away... Moral of the story: diversify your income stream as much as you can. I don't know much about advertising world, but it seems that AdSense is a bit of monopoly, and that sucks.
Random idea for a biz opportunity here: A service that insures content providers against AdSense account termination by routing all of the clicks through a filter to prevent "overeager" clicking by your fans, in exchange for a small fee. If your AdSense account is terminated, you'll be paid for it (just like if your car is totaled, your insurance company pays for it)
Who will insure the insurer against Google blocking this business model?
Also, given that clickfraud is a danger to Google's core business, Google likely spent enormous amount of money and engineering to have best detection possible. Beating Google at their own game will be difficult (i.e. insurer will lose money whenever fraudsters are better than insurer's detection, but Google catches them).
So basically, Google has written the rules so they can call you on it at any time and if they deem they're paying you too much money, they kill your account? Seems to weigh the playing field pretty heavily in their favor - they're getting the benefits of your direction of traffic to their advertisers, while reserving the right to arbitrarily kill your revenue. Given their more-or-less monopoly status on search (80% or more - too lazy to check the stats), this should probably be investigated by the FTC or DOJ.
This is ridiculous. Google makes more money when they pay you more money. The income is tied together. They get a cut. So, it's not that they feel like they are paying you too much. Many sites/individuals make a lot more money than this guy did on Adsense. In this case, they felt the guy was sending fraudulent clicks through the program.
Do you think the one-strike and you're out policy, with little chance of direct human-contact in resolving disputes is reasonable? For Google, they get to have their cake and eat it too - to them it probably doesn't matter if they lose a small revenue stream like this (yet they're still putting ads on his YouTube videos and search results), but the little guy gets hammered.
No, it sucks. I was just objecting to your incorrect assessment that it went down like this: "if they deem they're paying you too much money, they kill your account".
While this is true of Adsense for domains, it's not true for YouTube apparently. Ads still run beside this guy's videos whether or not Google/YouTube decides to give him a cut of the revenue.
The situation to me seems comparable to a book writer and a publisher. The writer is the one who is writing the book, he has the copyrights, and earns from selling it. The publisher spends on marketing, printing, etc, and gets a cut, but, the publisher is reliant on the writer. If the publisher want to sell the book without giving any revenue to the writer, then they would have to pay for a license. Otherwise, they are in breach of copyrights law.
So, if google wants to host other people's videos, they need to pay for them, unless people give the videos to google for free, as the video's are the creator's and thus copyrighted.
By that logic, if I were to create a video, it is in my interest to spread that video to as many video hosting providers as possible, and charge each of them.
Sir, I believe you are on to something absolutely brilliant, and will undoubtedly become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.
Does anyone actually get paid by Google Adsense? Almost everyone I know has been kicked from it, not early on but usually when a big payment is coming.
And this bit about returning the funds to advertisers? Any advertisers ever gotten money returned due to click fraud?
I love Google and pay for lots of their products (docs/storage, appengine, etc) but the adsense stuff seems very shady on Google's side as well. Maybe it is my misunderstanding but I know noone making good money on Google Adsense.
Granted this dude was violating the ToS but I know plenty of people kicked just before payment and with no reason for it. It seems like smaller sites or medium content sites they are glad to use for free ad space until it comes time to pay dues. I imagine there is lots of free advertising space and metrics gained from these situations.
Now, go to pof.com and try to find yourself an AdSense ad today. They have their own ad network now: https://ads.pof.com
Shoemoney still has AdSense ads, but has diversified his income stream quite a bit. I'd be willing to bet that he doesn't see anything near what he had been making from AdSense in 2005.
Before everyone jumps all over Google remember there are two sides to every story, and this is told completely from the perspective of the account holder, which should show him in the best light, but still appears he both encouraged ad clicks and had knowledge people were following through on this.
the adwords buyers must have complained enough to make his account go bye-bye - if enough adwords buyers do that, you are costing google more than they are making on you.
So what does this say then for all the free ad-supported mobile apps? I keep reading more and more of the success of ad-supported apps that would also face the same risks.
I do think however the flaw here is the writer informed users that clicking supports him - simple click fraud.
If you own several different media properties like this guy, is it a good strategy to incorporate each one separately, to keep an unintentional Adsense TOS violation from affecting all the others?
This is why a lot of subscription websites (which this was, apparently), don't display ads to logged in users. A small dedicated audience looks like click-fraud. Adsense and the like is best for drive-by visitors.
I did that even with my own websites, even though there is no subscription fee. Logged-in users get no ads, because I don't want them to click on them.
There was a similar issue on HN a long time ago (years?), but I can never find past articles that I'm looking for.
Ok this is obviously only one side of the story and the guy who is writing it is obviously a good writer? He knows how to manipulate the emotions of the reader with stuff like losing money right before christmas, which he keeps talking about over and over again even though that is entirely irrelevant to the facts of the case.
What we have here is,
Google says he is click frauding.
He says he is not click frauding.
The real problem is, maybe Google is right and this guy is a click frauder. We don't really know because Google shows no proof, holds no trial, allows no mediated appeal. As a company, not a government, they can get away with that. But as companies get larger and larger what is the difference between a company and a government?
Speak for yourself, I'm an atheist, losing(or wasting) money before zombie day is the intended purpose of the holiday, isn't it? Does it really illicit extra emotions?
Government has many special powers. Government can issue new laws. Government can put you in jail. Government can legally spy on you as long as they have a warrant.
The accountability should be proportional to acts.
If you want to execute someone, you better hold a fair trial and provide ample proof of wrongdoing.
If you create a straightforward agreement where only use of your non-essential service is at stake, you don't need accountability at all. It says right there that the agreement can be voided at any time by any party for any reason.
The size of Google has nothing to do with it. They are using the same legal framework as everyone else, big or small. If you were running a 2-person startup offering a service over internet you would be a fool to not include similar clause in your agreement with the exact same amount of accountability.
If you don't like that such agreements allow Google to act that way, that's fine, but accept that if you eliminate this possibility for Google, you eliminate it for every other business, small or big, internet-based or not and that would not be a good.
We don't want laws that treat big or small companies differently in cases like this (regardless of which one would be favored).
I think you ought to look into modern antitrust policy (as influenced by the U of Chicago). Google has something close to a monopsony for online video; between this and their perma-ban approach, many would argue their contract terms create an unfair restraint of trade.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] thread-Excessively complex user agreements
-Ability to arbitrarily suspend accounts
-Ability to void credited funds
Are there any other aspects that you (or anyone else) feel should be included?
Such businesses take huge risks since they are dealing with money and their bad phenomenons (tax evasion, credit-card/identity abuse, money laundry) without having real face-to-face contact and customer identification. Therefore, in order to stay competitive and manage their risk, they have in their agreements termination clauses which enable them to disable suspicious accounts unilaterally without providing explanations.
For both AdSense and PayPal, sustainable competition at feature-parity failed to appear. There aren't any agencies that allow a guy with only a few thousand impressions per month to earn a buck with a pay-per-click model, or any banks that allow you to open an account with them just by providing an email address. Which leads me to believe that the account closures are just part of the business model assumption which allows PayPalism corporations to manage their risk and survive.
But maybe I'm wrong and something better will emerge. The trick is to improve interactions with legitimate accounts while keeping abuse detection algorithms secret. Which might be a very, very difficult problem to solve...
And people are learning to adapt on both sides: e.g. people who sweep out their PayPal account constantly. Or those who have learned that you can hose a competitor if you make the programs think they're a fraudulent business.
Bad PR for google.. too bad you hear stories like this all the time.
I wonder how the customer service is going to be now that they are entering e-commerce space.
Call me a cynic but I think they don't send any information on purpose.
They're not required to send information and Legal probably doesn't want anything sent out in these cases that involves writing from a non-lawyer.
It's not clear to what extent he encouraged clicks, but asking visitors to click your ads is like asking for your account to be terminated.
Too bad Google shoots first and never asks any question.
It's really comfortable to live in a space without meaningful competition.
Ultimately the advertisers are paying for your AdSense income. It may not be your fault, but if you're providing less value to the advertiser, then it seems only fair that you don't participate, since your participation harms the whole market.
This is undeniably a problem with the current AdSense business model, but we all know this, choose to participate and accept the risk.
It seems a natural solution to the problem. Would you be able to pipe back conversion rates based on where the banner was shown?
Also wouldn't surprise me if one person having multiple AdSense accounts is a violation of their terms.
I probably wouldn't have bothered with it until reading this, but I always hear every investment should be done with a separate entity and this seems to be no different.
If you are releasing one or a few videos, revenue from Adsense is just about the only game in town. However if you have enough content that can survive outside of YouTube you create an opportunity to work directly with advertisers. Many video podcasters have moved this way, not hosting videos on Youtube and owning the ad relationships and revenue.
Being in the content game is the easy part of the equation; ad sales is the hard part. You can take the easy road and join a network, making pennies on the dollar and potentially getting "sacked" by an algorithm, or you can pound the pavement and sell some ads to people. They're more profitable, you diversify your income, but it's not easy.
For pricing, decide how you want to get paid. You have 3 basic choices: CPM (per 1000 ad/page views), CPC (per click) and CPA (per action, i.e. someone clicks your ad and then buys something from that site). The easiest for you will be CPM. So, set your prices low, like at $2 per 1000 ad views. Raise prices based on demand. My best piece of advice is that you will not get rich from one site. You need to have several websites making a few bucks a day to make a living.
Also, those advertisers are most likely advertising on other ad platforms as well. AdSense is king of CPC, but other sites specialize in CPM and CPA. Check out Commision Junction to get some ideas. There are many ad networks out there. And, if you want to run your own ad network, there is open source software to help you setup and manage that too.
Re: fair prices - Totally depends on your content, your market, and how targeted you are to the advertiser's audience. There are plenty of sub-$1 CPM display ads, and I've been a part of buying $170 CPM ads. But you should only worry about this only after you have sold out your ad inventory. Anything is better than nothing.
And then there is reference in the article to another commenter mentioning the same in the comments which he then edited to remove.
Sounds like there was at least a reason to suspect - sad if the users did that on their own and he had to suffer due to their actions but I find it hard to believe strangers will do this for making another stranger money.
To an extent, HN readers click on "rate my startup" links out of the goodness of their hearts. In any small, tight-knit community (like sailing, apparently), members of that community will try to help each other out, even if they don't actually know one another.
Who else would you work with (i.e., display advertising for) without having the ability to speak to someone by telephone when a difficult situation has occurred? None of our customers would tolerate this -- why do we continue to allow Google to get away with it?
I'm not saying this author is right or deserving of the revenue (I don't have all the details or facts), but what is clear is that he has: 1. Earned Google a good bit of revenue 2. Appears earnest 3. Deserves to interact with a real human in a real way (not by automated emails without the ability to reply)
Why aren't more people appalled by Google's actions and the way they treat their partners?!
Google has for all purposes a monopoly on mass-market web advertising
Full disclosure: I am employed by blip.tv.
They have, but it's always much more work, often more than a hobby would warrant
It's maddening though in a time when people -- one would hope -- would have access to better customer service, yet, it feels things are as bad as ever. It’s hard enough to reach someone on an e-commerce site, forget social networks (1-800-FACEBOOK ain’t happening anytime soon). Little different scenario in this case, but you get the gist.
The only time they seem to make it easy to reach out to a real person is when you need/want to buy something.
As an analogy, if you're a one-person developer, your problem is usually that you don't have enough users. You can participate in forum discussions with users of your software, fix bugs within days, send a personalized thank you e-mail for every purchase, all to provide exceptional level of service to grow word of mouth and get more customers. When you get to the size of Microsoft, that won't work anymore. Your expensive devs have to separated from users by layer of product management, your support calls cost you serious money and one troublesome buyer can cost you much more than he paid for in software etc.
Google finds itself in the same boat with AdSense. I don't know the exact scale of AdSense but it must be in millions of publishers and thousands of advertisers. Even a small number of people insisting you give them special consideration or explain in detail what exactly did they do wrong will burn incredible amount of support time and money.
It's clear why he was banned from AdSense and yet he wrote an epic post detailing his experience and inventing multiple reasons for why it wasn't so bad. Do you think that if someone at Google sent him a personal note explaining why he was banned, he would just say "oh, I get it now, you were so totally justified in terminating my account". No, he would keep badgering Google until they finally gave up responding and he would end up writing the same epic post, this time quoting extensively his correspondence with heartless Google employee who was not swayed by his obviously correct arguments.
Someone arguing with Google to not suspend their account has all the incentive to keep badgering Google until Google says "this is a final decision".
Google can't win this battle and they do the best anyone can do at that scale.
I agree right up to this point.
The economics of online advertising are extremely harsh when you add up the attention span of online users, the ease of fraud, and the feedback available to advertisers. It's a sea change that people need to come to terms with one way or another.
However the level to which Google dehumanizes publishers is quite likely to bite them in the ass. Enough of these articles and their publisher base will eventually shrink and open the door the competition. Now obviously the competition will not be able to change the economics, but PR is not Google's forté, and it's possible to do a much better job handling these incidents without any change in the economics.
Oh yes, I was also running little blocks of adverts provided by Adsense and, yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers – all of whom were interested in selling stuff to sailors.
...long story...
In the end it was click-fraud-ish.
There's a huge fear for those dependent on google adsense that they will get terminated out of the blue like this. The problem is, there's no great alternative. But instructing your visitors in some way to click on your ads does cross the line.
Disclaimer: I was banned from AdSense too and I still don't know what happened. Since my site had very low traffic, I suspect even one well meaning fan could clickfraud me into nonexistence.
I wonder how we could generate an economic incentive for Google to adopt it.
Want to incentivize Google? Convince Bing to implement it and see if Adsense customers convert as a result. If I felt Bing was treating their customers/vendors (ads is a really weird relationship :) better, I would consider using it (since as a search product it has approached Google pretty close).
But I can weigh in on the "make the action exponential" idea. Regarding the steps that the webspam team takes, we take stronger and stronger action as we see repeated violations or violations with more willful or damaging intent.
Hidden text might result in a 30 day removal, for instance (and the site can always remove the hidden text and do a reconsideration request before the 30 days is up, of course). But if we see the site repeatedly violating our guidelines or doing worse stuff, then the action is stronger.
Or do you remove them and not tell them at all, leaving them in the dark completley?
You can read the whole message that we send, but the relevant part would be "In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.
We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-.... When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=e... to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration."
As infractions get more serious and we believe that the SEO/site owner is more willful, we give less information to the people who do spammier things.
Hope that helps to answer your question.
If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those.
Outright, criminal fraud is one thing, but I would argue that it's unethical to hold up the funds he has already accrued. Sure, cut him off, but perhaps it's not the best idea to rely on the good intentions of people when you offer cash for clicks.
No, he didn't. A "small botnet" or Tor is not particularly useful to force you to violate the Adsense ToS by telling your visitors to click on your ads.
If it is a mere algorithm, then it is not unforeseeable, that, due to no fault of your own whatever, but malice of competitors, you can get banned, though, in these cases, I think there would be a good legal argument, not least because the google contract you sign up to is not entirely recognised by some courts, but replaced in many instances by what is or seems reasonable, as, when you sign up to the contract you have no choice but to sign up, thus, there is no equal bargaining power.
I'm sure the fraud detection system is not perfect but in this case it actually worked as designed. Yay for Google, boo for people who try to take advantage of the system.
1) fraudulent clicks that could be generated by a botnet
2) instructions on the site itself that you have control over telling your visitors to click on ads to make you more money.
I don't want to come across as defending google on this. They could use a lot more hands on customer service. This sort of sudden termination is scary and sucks. I'm just pointing out, there is unjustified termination (which also happens) and termination based on willful fraud.
I know he's wrong and I know exactly what he did wrong: he enticed visitors to his website to click on ads so that he makes more money at the expense of advertisers. You cannot do it for reasons that are both obvious and clearly speelled in AdSense agreement.
He is unwilling to correct the problem. He's even unwilling to admit there is a problem - his whole argument to favor theory of cruel and unusual treatment from Google is based on his fundamental belief that he really did nothing wrong. Plus irrelevant personal details designed to trigger sympathy for him, as a person, and detract attention away from the facts of what he did.
If a sailor buys a sailing book by entering Amazon via my website, I get a 5 per cent referral fee. If some-one spends $200 on a Kindle or a camera, [they] get their next three month s subscription for free.
That's definitely abuse of Amazon's affiliate program and crosses the line from click-fraud-ish to full blown criminal fraud. Aside from being against the terms of their scheme, his clear intention is to induce site visitors to make planned purchases through his affiliate links, something that is obviously completely contrary to the spirit of his agreement with Amazon.
The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely scraping by. By cutting him off, Google is losing revenue to protect the integrity of their advertising marketplace. They're doing the decent thing by their advertisers in taking a cheat out of the system. I wholeheartedly support Google in their actions.
However, as a practical issue, I fail to see any practical reason to disable the guy's revenue from YouTube videos, based on clicks from an unrelated site. Just stop counting the clicks on the site, Google!
Really? I have thought about it for about two minutes and came up with several.
1. Google might assume that someone who has committed click fraud in the past might do so again, and preemptively remove other facets of that person's ability to harm the system.
2. Google might want to discourage people from committing piecemeal fraud by ensuring them that there is no way to risk just part of your account with Google. By disabling all of this guy's ability to make money from Google, they are sending the signal, "Hey, don't think you can pull a fast one and still keep any part of your business with us, even if the site is unrelated."
3. Maybe there was some undisclosed badness going on with the Youtube account that we are not seeing in the account given in this article.
Amazon would benefit from that message being on every site on the internet. It's advertising for them and letting people know they can help their favorite sites adds an extra incentive to sway people to order stuff.
I don't see anything even slightly fraudulent about saying, "Amazon pays us commission on sales made with our affiliate code attached, please buy expensive things there", and I don't see how that's bad for anyone.
eCommerce vendors are even happy to partner with sites like Quidco that openly offer cashback rewards for people making purchases via their affiliate links.
It seems you can display Google's ads, but should never comment on them in any way, not even to say 'Gosh, I really like how they so accurately list companyA, companyB and companyC as relevant for my site.' The first rule of using AdSense is, you don't talk about AdSense?
What you cannot do, for obvious reasons, is to entice people to click on ads. It doesn't matter how subtle the encouragement is, how good are your intentions, how many kids you still have to support, how many kittens you saved from certain death. It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement and violating that agreement gets you banned from AdSense.
I'm also making money from AdSense and the simple reality is that if Google doesn't take steps to limit the kind of click fraud that this guy openly, if very verbosely, admits to, it'll hurt everyone else who's not matching it and in the long term will hurt everyone, period, because there will be less money in the ecosystem if ad publishers feel ripped off.
In this case, it seems to be the regrettable situation where someone is being punished for moral behavior. Regrettable, but perhaps unavoidable. However, that's as far as you should be willing to go. Trying to justify Google's actions by accusing the one that was punished of immoral behavior is not necessary and not warranted.
Someone is being held accountable for a contract they willingly entered. The morality of the behavior is not at issue - moral or not they legally agreed not to do it. The rest, IMO, is hand waving.
I'm not saying that Google did an excellent job of handling this situation. It amazes me that they think it's appropriate to revoke thousands of dollars in earnings without (usually) providing someone to talk to. That said, asking people to click links on your site is bound to invite well-meaning individuals to click on ads they have no intent of following, which is practically the definition of click-fraud.
If however, say KFC is advertising on the TV, and instead of impression, they are taking a cut whenever someone who watched the TV goes to KFC, then the situation would be very different. Which is the case of Google, where each click has a cost.
My advice to him, instead of depending on Google, just get the advertisers directly and just charge by impression, or at least a fix charge for a period of time. Since there are value in the stuff he is doing, I would believe that there would be advertisers willing to pay anyway, just a matter how much.
The only downside going that way, now he has to do the marketing to potential advertisers as well, as opposed to Google doing it for him previously.
Isn't that what affiliate links are for? Encouraging people to buy something through them.
Many review sites right glistening copy then add an affiliate link. is that against the spirit of the agreement too?
"14. You will not offer any person or entity any consideration or incentive (including any money, rebate, discount, points, donation to charity or other organization, or other benefit) for using Special Links (e.g., by implementing any “rewards” or loyalty program that incentivizes persons or entities to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links). "
This guy really managed to find a lot of ways to shoot himself in the foot.
a) Amazon have not cut him off (and I hope someone will draw the risk you highlight to his attention before they do)
b) there's no incentive offered to use the links in the sense of just visiting Amazon. There's an incentive offered to people who make a purchase there, which is an entirely separate act. Now 'visiting' is only offered as an example and he probably is violating the agreement by giving subscription discounts on some purchases, but it's an easy misunderstanding to make, especially given that it's not the central plank of his business model or anything like it.
Ironically, his forthright explanation of how his business model supports a positive interpretation of his motives, because he doesn't even seem to understand the potential pitfalls of what he's doing. If he were the scammer than some are suggesting, it would not be in his interest to expose his methods.
The sort of fraud ad brokers want to avoid is 'www.fraud-u-lent.com: Hey visitors! click on 10 of these ads and get FREE warez/porn/iPad/car for every 10 clix!!'
On the other hand, there's a legitimate conversation that goes along the lines of '[niche site] is great! how do you manage to provide us with so much great content for our [niche hobby]?' 'Oh thanks, I have been a [niche hobbyist] for 20 years, and accumulated a lot of [niche content/skill]. Also those ads at the side of the page help support the project so you can enjoy it for free.'
The second is technically violating any ad agreement that prohibits click invitations, but in a vastly different way from the first example. An overly mechanical or aggressive interpretation is throwing the baby out with the bath water, and if it becomes too common it will become (or perhaps already is) an opportunity for a competitor.
Google doesn't prevent you from discussing how AdSense works in general.
What you cannot do is to specifically ask people to click on ads on your website.
The underlaying premise is not that people are ignorant but that they will do the things you ask them to do.
It's not the same as me buying an ad on your site and encouraing traffic.. it's not an affiliate sales program.. it's a very specific advertising setup that very clearly states you are not to encourage people to click on the ads.
I appreciate that a more responsive feedback loop can be exploited by bad guys as easily as it can support good guys, but the approach Google has taken creates a greater incentive for the guy to pull his old material and create a new online identity than it does for him to correct the minor flaw in his marketing. It's easy to say 'don't ever encourage users to click on ads,' but half the appeal of niche sites like this to members is being able to have conversational contact with an individual whose work is especially admirable, or through which the member can live vicariously.
What's happening here is that a legitimate honest business model (subscriber sales for niche content, with a minor secondary revenue stream from ads) is being punished because of Google's inability to differentiate it from a dishonest business model. The huge fear you describe is a reflection of both the asymmetry between Google and the small advertiser, and of the difficulty in understanding exactly what behavior is in or out. Not everyone finds those contracts easy to read or understand, and Google is actually raising barriers to entry if it enforces them too rigidly and giving greater incentive to the black hats than the white hats. I strongly suspect that this is a limiting factor on Google's own revenue, which is stuck on a local maximum because Google itself is has a much lower tolerance for information asymmetry than it demands of its content providers.
Google correctly identified his business as dishonest and terminated his account per agreement that the guy signed when he started using AdSense.
You try to make a case for Google trying to determine shades of gray, but it's a non-scalable, slippery slope.
The current rule is crystal clear and simple: don't encourage users to click on ads they otherwise wouldn't. By definition every such click is fraudulent because the user wouldn't otherwise perform it.
Google (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot implement more subtle rules (that weight factors like how many times someone did it, how often does he do it, how subtle the encouragement is, how many kids he has to support) in a scalable way.
Google couldn't even apply more subtle rules in a consistent way, giving fraudsters even more weapon in what is a PR game (take all the ample, emotional justification from the above post AND allow that fraudster to point to other people who are doing similar things but Google hasn't taken action against them because some fallible person applied a different subtle standard for what fraud is than some other fallible person).
As this thread demonstrates, there's plenty of people willing to sympathise with the fraudster despite clear, self-admitted evidence of wrongdoing based purely on his self-professed (hence extremely biased) version of how good of a person he is and how good intentions were and how badly he was treated by big, cold Google. Emotion can trump facts.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051078
Heck, I'd bet an algorithm would've caught it (or at least flagged it, caused a review, and had it confirmed) a loooong time ago. Which would've cut off his income while it was smaller. A smooth-functioning, impersonal algorithm may have been preferable in this case.
Google could provide a kind of back-and-forth here, to restore the ability of a site author to provide a testimonial for a particular advertiser. An author would have to provide a (short and limited) list of sites and testimonial copy for each one.
A sailing site could then, for a particular sailcloth manufacturer's ad, provide a short testimonial noting the high quality of the product, etc...and Google could serve up that custom testimonial along with the ad.
You'd either have happy advertisers, or not.
There's a difference between "I support this product and you should check them out" and "click on these ads." Google's ads are targeted and beyond them being about sailing, he doesn't necessarily know what's being shown.
So it's pretty difficult for him to personally recommend particular ads or companies. I'd like to see the exact messaging he sent to his subscribers.
A warning would have been better. But by this point he had already essentially scammed advertisers for tens of thousands of dollars (he mentions $3000 in the last 6 week period).
What would you suggest a middle-man do, if person-X has scammed your clients for tens of thousands of dollars? A polite warning, or cut them off ASAP? And remember that in this case the middle-man is the largest middle-man out there, and deals with billions of interactions.
In that scenario, every additional click, even if of decreasing marginal utility, is a win for the advertiser and the publisher is making them a favor by sending as much traffic as they can.
For Google AdSense and other programs based on pay-per-click scheme, advertiser pays for each click so worthless clicks do cost them money and benefit the publisher. That's why it's fraud. There is a strong incentive for one side (publisher) to take advantage of the other side (advertiser) and if allowed to exist on scale, would harm the whole marketplace.
The phrasing you used suggest fixed scheme. If it is used in the context of pay-per-click scheme, then yes, it does violate the agreement and I doubt there's any pay-per-click scheme that doesn't ban such behavior.
As far as the videos on YouTube though, I agree there is not much alternative because of the sheer size and reach of YouTube.
Always remember, Google (by themselves) lives and dies based on original content. Google supplies very little OC (other than perhaps Google Maps). The millions and millions of sites that present themselves at the doorstep of AdSense are seeking a quick and painless way of funding themselves. These same site are providing the OC that supports AdSense (while others provide the advertising spends). Google is the switchboard between the OC and the advertisers. I see no particular impediment (other than Google's size) preventing another from entering the same type of market.
What it boils down to is: if you rely on those earnings to sustain your business, guard against anything that tosses you into a suspicious category. And that is a moving target as well.
I do empathize with him, as I had to toil through AdSense appeal process, but that means diddly-squat.
There are unmentioned albeit publicly verified limits or thresholds that a publisher should abide by. It's in the publishers best interest to learn these, consult on what to do before ad-sense is enabled and what to do afterwards.
The "correct" response would be to pull all his videos from YouTube, move them to a competing service, and write Google to let them know why. Of course, this would unfortunately mean traffic would drop close to zero... (what's the closest competitor to YouTube right now?)
Were I the author, I would certainly not want Google continuing to profit from my labors if they ceased paying me.
As an aside, now that he has been 'sacked' by google, google's making 100% of the advertising revenue from his videos instead of some lower amount. That's very convenient for google.
Random idea for a biz opportunity here: A service that insures content providers against AdSense account termination by routing all of the clicks through a filter to prevent "overeager" clicking by your fans, in exchange for a small fee. If your AdSense account is terminated, you'll be paid for it (just like if your car is totaled, your insurance company pays for it)
Also, given that clickfraud is a danger to Google's core business, Google likely spent enormous amount of money and engineering to have best detection possible. Beating Google at their own game will be difficult (i.e. insurer will lose money whenever fraudsters are better than insurer's detection, but Google catches them).
So, if google wants to host other people's videos, they need to pay for them, unless people give the videos to google for free, as the video's are the creator's and thus copyrighted.
Sir, I believe you are on to something absolutely brilliant, and will undoubtedly become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.
I too got fired by Google's algorithm and didn't do anything whatsoever wrong. They are heartless.
Worse of all, this article does not mention the monopoly they have. They own the online ad market. No one else exists that is anywhere as good.
It's straight-up monopoly, and if you get on their black list, you're out.
And this bit about returning the funds to advertisers? Any advertisers ever gotten money returned due to click fraud?
I love Google and pay for lots of their products (docs/storage, appengine, etc) but the adsense stuff seems very shady on Google's side as well. Maybe it is my misunderstanding but I know noone making good money on Google Adsense.
Granted this dude was violating the ToS but I know plenty of people kicked just before payment and with no reason for it. It seems like smaller sites or medium content sites they are glad to use for free ad space until it comes time to pay dues. I imagine there is lots of free advertising space and metrics gained from these situations.
so do these people: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&b... http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
Now, go to pof.com and try to find yourself an AdSense ad today. They have their own ad network now: https://ads.pof.com
Shoemoney still has AdSense ads, but has diversified his income stream quite a bit. I'd be willing to bet that he doesn't see anything near what he had been making from AdSense in 2005.
Note that Google started offering Direct Deposit in 2005. :)
He should then offer them direct advertisements on his website. Sounds like the ads were actually effective.
An ad buyer would of course want to do pay per sale instead of pay per click given the site's history :)
I do think however the flaw here is the writer informed users that clicking supports him - simple click fraud.
I did that even with my own websites, even though there is no subscription fee. Logged-in users get no ads, because I don't want them to click on them.
There was a similar issue on HN a long time ago (years?), but I can never find past articles that I'm looking for.
What we have here is,
Google says he is click frauding.
He says he is not click frauding.
The real problem is, maybe Google is right and this guy is a click frauder. We don't really know because Google shows no proof, holds no trial, allows no mediated appeal. As a company, not a government, they can get away with that. But as companies get larger and larger what is the difference between a company and a government?
Government has many special powers. Government can issue new laws. Government can put you in jail. Government can legally spy on you as long as they have a warrant.
The accountability should be proportional to acts.
If you want to execute someone, you better hold a fair trial and provide ample proof of wrongdoing.
If you create a straightforward agreement where only use of your non-essential service is at stake, you don't need accountability at all. It says right there that the agreement can be voided at any time by any party for any reason.
The size of Google has nothing to do with it. They are using the same legal framework as everyone else, big or small. If you were running a 2-person startup offering a service over internet you would be a fool to not include similar clause in your agreement with the exact same amount of accountability.
If you don't like that such agreements allow Google to act that way, that's fine, but accept that if you eliminate this possibility for Google, you eliminate it for every other business, small or big, internet-based or not and that would not be a good.
We don't want laws that treat big or small companies differently in cases like this (regardless of which one would be favored).