Oh I missed that the first time around. That changes things. Especially given that phishing claims started same time as everything else. Sounds like someone is mass-report attacking them or something then.
My hunch on this was that there probably was a misconfiguration with whatever service they're using to send out emails. If they don't have the sending domain whitelisted with whatever service they're using, it can look super fishy (or phishy!). I'd be really, really surprised to find out that Google's automated AdSense ad quality tools are in any way tied to their email quality tools.
It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently.
One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article?
It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.
Imagine being plucked from college at 22 and getting payed 200k+ total compensation with an introduction telling you how you're now one of the best at your field working with the smartest people in the world... how you're changing the world before you've even been on-boarded.
It's like being told you are heir to the throne, and many engineers carry that same princely arrogance obliviously. At least doctors and lawyers have gone through a second gauntlet after acing school to temper this somewhat. Those fields might not even start making good money until you are years above the entry level, even with a pricey professional degree.
Maybe in the past where these professional degrees guaranteed highly compensated positions, but that's not the case now that these fields are saturated. A medical school grad still has a painful and overworked road to travel before they start making serious money and overcome their medical school debt. Similarly, if you are in a law school that isn't in the top 10, or you are not in the top 10 of your class, drop out while you can because you are looking at a career of terrible pay and insurmountable debt.
These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.
As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money).
My back of napkin math from another comment:
I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this.
Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
Providing tech support by responding to customers is a different beast entirely to content moderation, however. It may be the case that human oversight of algorithmic moderation is also unreasonable, but I find this fairly unlikely. I wouldn't expect it would require quite so many man hours. But again, could be wrong.
> Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use.
Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.
I was averaging it out assuming there will be an overhead of users using the channel for many other reasons too, eg. they dont know how something works, there are language barriers, other errors get attributed to google (eg. android vs manufacturer) etc.
But this is a fair point, all the assumptions I make (eg. how many products a user uses, number of requests for support, etc.) are hypothetical and might be incorrect if this was actually implemented. Based on my judgement though, while variable might change, the end numbers will probably remain the same.
I believe your guess for frequency is off by a lot, my guess would be more in the vicinity of a tenth of those assumption.
However, more importantly: going in with a "we need to support this" mindset alters incentives. Suddenly, useless error messages and lacking documentation aren't okay any more.
A different approach to solve the issue, if it even exists at that scale: make them pay for it. If you want service, pay $10. That's more than enough cover Google's cost and it's cheap for anyone that really requires service because e.g. their account has been locked, or Google's systems have disabled ads on their site. At the same time, it's expensive enough that you don't get flooded with "why do you show me those videos on the front page?" requests.
2/3/4 billion users paying $10 a year would certainly change things. I think the closest I have seen is the Google one program but not sure if people are aware or would want to pay for it.
For power users, I completely agree it might be the only feasible idea.
The closest parallel I can think of Amazon where there is cost of products involved (and >> $10 year I suspect) - they do a good job but even they work hard to make sure you cant easily reach a person.
Yes google should have as many people working for it as the advertising industry that it savaged. It should at least have customer service. You know a phone number you call to talk to someone.
These apologies to mega corporate is very sad. I am disappointed in you.
A possible solution would be to charge for support for people who get paid by you, although it probably creates a whole host of other problems too that would be difficult to balance. Also competition so those same people have someone else to go to.
I don't think they need a human to handle every single case you mention above. If advertisers had specific actionable steps to take when there's a problem and a way to say, "We've done those things," (and I'm sure Google can automate checking that they actually have), "and it's still not working," they probably wouldn't need to have as many humans working on this as you're saying above.
A lot of the problem is that when Google screws up, there's no recourse. We don't hear much about when Google gets it right because those people's problems were solved. Surely some significant portion of the incidents you mentioned above fall into that category.
does that means that we have to throw the baby with the bathwater and just forbid any company from being this big, because they could not possibly add value to the world in general past a certain scale?
Is 3 mins a ticket realistic? That seems super low for anything that isn't dead simple.
I think the old internet was a lot better because the ratio of moderators to users was much, much higher and the moderators tended to be well informed enthusiasts that were usually running the site and had the ability / authority to fix anything / everything.
The easy solution to me is just add money. Let me pay on-demand for support. I've had a GSuite account for ages and never needed help with anything, but if my account got locked and I needed to talk to a human with the ability / authority to unlock it I wouldn't hesitate to pay $50-$100.
IMO part of the problem at Google is likely years and years of bragging instead of building and the tooling is probably absolute garbage to the point that a human wouldn't make a difference. That's why I say 3 mins seems low. I bet there are a lot of things that a human couldn't fix even if they wanted to.
That seems a bit ironic of an accusation given all of the people who don't do even back of the envelope math about what their demands for scaling would cost to try to do manually. Isn't that like saying plumbers are arrogantly obsessed with imprisoning water using pipes instead of free flowing streams of water while not considering the evaporation and contamination of said approach?
Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus.
It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
It's a hard problem, because the alternative to algorithmic solutions is human solutions, which people are quite unhappy with as well. Facebook for example has gotten a ton of negative press over the years for their human content moderators.
The problem with facebook isn't that they use humans, it's that they treat them very poorly. Treat people with dignity and respect, and the good press will follow.
After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness.
They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves.
As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.
You could also interpret it in a negative way. They don't maintain _anything_ over there. How hard would it be to whitelist (can I still say that?) super high value, bulk sending, domains?
I suspect that’s what they tell themselves. And that heuristics are beneath them. Better to have an elegant algorithm that does the wrong thing automatically than a set of human-tweaked rules that could come much closer (also automatically) to doing the right thing.
The explanation could be that Google would prefer to use the excuse that "it's our objective algorithm that downranked our competitors, not us!"
And before you say "Aha! There you go assuming malice instead of incompetence" - keep in mind that Google has used this "our algorithm is objective so we don't manipulate what appears on our search pages" for years and years. It's the go-to strategy they use to appear neutral when called upon by governments.
Facebook has also attempted something similar in recent cases.
Because Google has a skin in the game. It is a de-facto monopolist in the online advertisement business, and online search. And it's only the political goodwill that keeps it safe from antitrust scrutiny.
So, it's a kinda wink-wink nudge-nudge pact, that Google politically aligns with the Democrats, and the Democrats turn a blind eye on Google's monopolistic state.
There are plenty of examples, just try searching "Newsom Estate" on Google [0] vs DuckDuckGo [1] and count critical vs. approving articles out of first 10 results.
Critical vs approving articles is a very weak proxy for antitrust. In this case most of them come from the same source (a conservative media company). It seems to me Google is better about removing useless results, or that which are regurgitated (copied) content, than DDG.
I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Doubly so when you read the sources listed as they're all regurgitating the conspiracy-fodder into one another.
I would agree with it if Google results showed one page from that conservative media company, while dropping others as redundant.
Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap').
So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.
I'm confused, the two main headlines, one about property tax, and one about being gifted the estate, appear on both engines.
DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second.
The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.
> why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation
When people assume malice so often as you mentioned, it, at least intuitively, feels easier to fault human moderation than algorithms.
Algorithms offer a black box which protect against accusations of bias. If accused of bias, an algorithm's biases can just be labeled unintentional accidents, whereas a human's biases are malicious.
At some level though incompetence has to transition to malice.
Do we really believe Google does not have the resources to hire and retain competent people? or are they willfully incompetent as a shield or cover for their malice
How many times can they play "oops our bad it was just a mistake"
An organisation the size of Google's probably fucks up thousands of times daily. I reckon <1% of issues are actually complained about, so yeah, I'd believe it's a mistake.
If no one tries it, no one will ever get it right. Sure, they could do it alongside real support in a simulated way, but that doesn't seem like it fits with their MO.
My guess is that it's pretty simple. There are ML models predicting the ad quality score; when the predicted outcomes for a site/account don't match reality it is a strong signal that something is wrong. Other inference models determine what is likely being violated on the site or by the account. A human has no chance of digging through the model to figure out exactly what causes the flagged outcome.
The only solution is trying various changes on the site and seeing what the models and clickers/consumers think of it unless you want to try to pay Google to deepdream your site for you with their inference models; good luck with that.
It's not worth it for Google to fix rare edge cases; fixing them manually may even bias the models to cause problems for a greater number of sites. I am sure the models are trained as well as humanly possible; there are millions of dollars on the table at the fringes. Every employee's time is most valuably spent improving the models as a whole and not chasing down one-off edge-cases unless it's for a very high profile client. I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists).
Accept AdSense for what it is; a highly-profitable-for-Google way to use ML to turn HTTP into $$$. It will not work for every site, only 99.99xx% of them.
I think the preferred term is "allowlist" not "whitelist". I like Allowlist personally because it's immediately obvious what it means esp for less technical folk. It takes time for new terms to become commonplace.
Post hoc rationalisation, but okay. My non-technical friends know exactly what a whitelist/blacklist are but none of them have ever heard these new politically correct terms.
> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.
Some random source on the internet tells me Alphabet made around 7 billion profit in a quarter last year. That's 28 billion per year. At 100k/year per person you get 280 000 people doing moderation for you to breakeven. According to another random source Alphabet has about 120k employees.
The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
Human solutions have problems too. Inconsistency, monitoring, access control. Every employee is a potential leak or Twitter takeover. Building systems to manage these things are difficult, painful, and could make Google do work they aren't very good at.
Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service.
From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.
One thing I imagine is if you scale up assuming that algorithmic solutions will be good enough, and then find out that they aren't, you find yourself in a hole, because you haven't budgeted enough to hire human moderators now, and you have enough visibility and investors that it is hard to scale down.
There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this.
Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.
I think the more correct answer to "Why Are Currently No Ads on Techdirt?" is "Because we put all of our eggs in one basket."
Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream.
There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.
Literally the last paragraph of the article is a call for help in finding these "plenty of alternatives" so instead of being snide maybe you can help out by listing some?
I'm curious, what are the "plenty of alternatives" exactly?
We have tried a lot of different advertising networks and sadly we have found none that's even in the same ballpark as AdSense (revenue wise). Advertising on the web is a shit show.
TripleLift, Sharethrough, AppNexus (now Xander), Rubicon Project, OpenX, GumGum, Index, Amazon A9. There are dozens of video demand partners as well. All of those have performed as well or better, from my experience.
Where google has all of them beat is payment terms - net 21 is hard to beat.
There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable.
They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long.
My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned.
And it's been that way since. No recourse. Just ... shut out.
This was a site with 100% user-generated content. If Google can't handle something like that, well ...
I don't think it's the job of private actors to stop a monopoly from forming. Google's acquisition of double-click should have never been approved by the SEC.
>Google's acquisition of double-click should have never been approved by the SEC.
It seems obvious in hindsight that the acquisition would kill competition but at the time, it didn't seem so. Like right now, in hindsight, Facebook's acquisition of instagram should be blocked - at the time it looked risky.
Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article would be, "Why is Techdirt closing down?". Their support page[0] lists 8 different revenue sources other than Google Ads.
And this is precisely the type of diversity that you want. Signing up for 5 different ad networks isn't really good diversity, because:
A) your different revenue streams are cannibalizing each other (there's a limit to how many different ad networks you can shove on the same page), so you can't grow your revenue as you diversify,
but more importantly,
B) many of the factors that affect one ad network (ad blocking, political pressures and privacy laws, fundamental inability to moderate well) will affect all of them.
It's not good to have 5 different revenue streams that can all simultaneously be destroyed by the same event. In that scenario you've increased complexity, but you haven't gotten a significant gain in reliability. On the other hand, pulling in money from advertising, Patreon, merchandise, product commissions, and even Kickstarter campaigns means that no single event will ruin your site.
I think it's important for people looking to diversify income streams to think about what each new income stream offers, rather than just duplicating an existing stream X times. I don't see any advantage in having 5 different frameworks for serving ads on a single site. I see a lot of advantages from setting up a Patreon on the side and selling podcast ads outside of your site.
You don't add a second ad network to widen your revenue stream just like you don't have a backup ISP to double your bandwidth. You do it so that when you have a (temporary) outage with one you can quickly switch to the other and not lose operations. There are some classes of outages that might affect both ad-streams, but there are other classes (like account status issues) that are completely independent.
But that depends a lot on whether or not the outage is actually temporary. From the sound of this article, it doesn't sound like it is.
Sure, Techdirt is hedging its bets and saying it might turn Google Ads back on eventually. But the account issues they're talking about aren't going to go away; there's nobody you can yell at with Google to make their moderation suddenly better.
I still want to push the idea that if you're diversifying your income, you should actually diversify it, not just have multiple accounts in the same field. There are independent issues that might effect one ad network and not another, sure. Those independent issues also won't affect podcast ads or product sponsorships.
In other words, redundancy != diversity.
Not to say redundancy is useless, of course. But it really doesn't sound like redundancy is Techdirt's problem here, it sounds like they're disillusioned with page ads in general.
"Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose" reads one.
While I have NO IDEA what that's about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it's because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I've read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever.
Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?
Yes, I can use a programmatic ad exchange such a Google’s to push ads on a site that would result in a negative experience for visitors. The creative review process is pretty lax. I haven’t heard of a documented attack, but it would be easy to grief a small site in such a way.
I remember an old blog that was trolled by having homoerotic ads plastered all over it, but looking into the details now they just bribed the server master.
There have been several waves of attacks where somebody posted malicious ads via Adsense that would use JS to redirect visitors to a different page. In the cases I was involved with, they were only targeting mobile traffic and redirected to a scam-site that asked users to download an app to fix a virus etc.
We've reported it, never heard back from Google. It went away after a few days each time, and hasn't happened in two or three years, at least not to any site I'm involved with.
My guess is that they ran it on smaller sites only and targeted those. In my case, it was a "entertainment news"-site that pulled in about 3-5k visitors/day back then - enough to get a lot of victims seeing your ad but not enough that they'd have a direct line to Google or have their own IT people.
I'm not sure about the adsense part, but they definitely can for the part where gmail is flagging their newsletter as phishing. Gmail has an option where any user can report a received email as phishing.
I play this game with Google every month or so when the webmaster console reports some mobile experience issues, but when I do a manual scan, there are no issues. So I mark them as resolved and then there are no issues for the next month or so.
I've also seen several Search Console issues that displayed a "Last Crawled" date months or years in the past. They had long since gone outdated. In some cases the entire website had been replaced by that point.
Open markets require a fair and impartial judiciary.
I really wish Congress' investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse.
Tort is very important for a functioning free market. The government just doesn't have the capability to police everyone, and civil court allows the people to police each other. Which exactly why large corporations move to eliminate their civil liability with users.
I don't know if this is the case with techdirt, but by far the most common reason why sites and domains (for mail) end up getting flagged is because their resources have been hijacked by organized criminals and are being used for crime, unbeknownst to the people who own the domains. So if this ever happens to you your first instinct should be to question your own production security situation, not to assume that Google has gone off the rails.
Well let's entertain this possibility. It then seems very easy for Google to report why it disabled or why you were flagged.
Playing the guessing game is not helpful. In my experience, things just go dark and you get very little or no helpful messaging about resolving the problem.
This. Having been in a similar scenario, the most frustrating part is hearing "there's a problem, it's bad enough that we're disabling your account, but we can't even give you a hint what the actual issue was. We hope you can figure it out, maybe we'll eventually re-instate your account".
In my experience, you can usually find something that COULD be the cause by digging through analytics/reports, if you can demonstrate that you took positive action on this, and get it infront of the right support people, they can sometimes help you out and ask for your account to be re-evaluated. You will never, ever find out if this is the reason they disabled your account in the first place though.
Then, prepare for your account to be paused again.
We had some abuse on our site that Google blocked us for - people were trying to run a scam through it. Except the scam was being propagated on youtube and Google did nothing about the videos despite multiple reports from us.
So my attitude is pretty simple: Google can fuck off. They can't even fix their own properties and will ban you for their inability to do so.
So, just to be clear, by "ban" you mean they stopped serving ads on your site, or something else?
As a seller of advertising space, to what extent is Google obligated to fill your inventory? How reliant are you on assumptions about whether they will and how much?
Isn't it funny that Google complains about clickbait while many of there sites/apps do exactly that and have gotten worse in the recent years.
Like in Gmail Google ads "pretend" to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails.
(Sure there is a small Ad label but it's indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject)
Similar things can be observed fruit custom page/domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.
A few months ago, I tried experimenting with Google ads to drive some traffic to a side project of mine which was basically a chess-over-videochat website. A little more than 40 impressions later, it was taken down for being "in violation of our Google ad policies". There was never any indication what the violation actually was. I replied and asked several times hoping to get a human to tell me what I had actually done wrong. Instead, they kept sending me an automated email that said, "After reviewing your case and taking your feedback into consideration, we've confirmed that your account was and still is in violation of our Google Ads policies."
They also made it seem like I was some cyber criminal by suggesting that if I tried to create another account, they would automatically take that down too.
There are a handful of decent "adsense/manage your own ads" and "add adsense to your site" plugins, but the self-service model wasn't rich with options. The few I did start testing had bumpy roads for implementing and managing the integration into the template.
I didn't test this one.
Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.
For a small site, Amazon Associates is probably the most reliable and non-shady opportunity besides Google. If the site get's a few million pageviews a month, options improve.
This is what my company does and it works well enough, though your site would need a reasonable amount of traffic or industry clout before an ad-buyer would take your email/call seriously.
You can move to a cost per acquisition model, where you get paid when your traffic converts. There are tons of those around (including the Amazon program below)
Big red flag. If you are connecting random people via video chat you open yourself to all sorts of abuse. I'm not saying that it is happening on your service, just that advertizers (and therefore google) are wary of videochat.
Blame chatroulette. When people like google hear "videochat" they immediately think of that ridiculous image-recognition software that chatroulette rolled out in a feeble attempt to reduce abuse.
I am not connecting random people via video chat (the site generates a unique url that is meant to be shared among friends). However, even if I was connecting random people, I think it would have been appropriate for them to specify why they suspended my account.
I doubt it had anything to do with the video chat aspect though.
This is the link they pointed me to in their suspension email https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/2375414
Given that I received no warning, they must have suspended me for an "egregious violation" of which they define five:
- Circumventing systems
- Counterfeit
- Promotion of unauthorized pharmacies
- Unacceptable business practices
- Trade Sanctions violation
I am really curious what their algorithm saw in my little chess website that suggests that I'm peddling pharmaceuticals, counterfeiting money, or selling banned technology to unsavory regimes. Heck, I don't even accept payments!
My best guess is that their algorithm panicked because I have that automatic redirect to a new unique URL when you click to start a new game. Apart from that, I have no idea what it could possibly be.
"Counterfeit" might be the issue. Do you have any method of reporting copyright violations? If you are offering a streaming video service they might think that it could be used to stream copyrighted material. Maybe the problem is as simple as having an appropriate DMCA contact info displayed on the homepage.
> Google Ads prohibits the sale or promotion for sale of counterfeit goods. Counterfeit goods contain a trademark or logo that is identical to or substantially indistinguishable from the trademark of another. They mimic the brand features of the product in an attempt to pass themselves off as a genuine product of the brand owner. This policy applies to the content of your ad and your website or app.
> Google Ads counterfeit vs. DMCA/Copyright/Pirated products
> Counterfeiters mimic the trademark brand features, rather than copying the product itself (software, books, artwork, movies, etc.).
Do you used the current date/time and/or Math.random() to generate your random URLs client-side?
I left Google's indexing system 10 years ago, but back then, I made some inelegant workarounds to prevent these features from breaking duplicate page detection. I'm nearly certain the code I wrote has all been replaced with something Chrome-based, but I'm just trying to think of things that could trip up page analysis.
I could see how very rare patterns that are typically used to intentionally trip up page analysis might put your pages on some bad actor list. I really have very little idea how these auto-detection systems are implemented, and these are wild guesses, but they're hopefully better than nothing.
Just don't use AdSense. Starting a business depending on AdSense money is a bad idea to begin with, even if you have a good account. It can just randomly be banned and you will never know why.
You hire a digital marketing agency or a marketing manager that has contacts inside Google Ads to get you unflagged. I work at a national nonprofit and while we could handle the marketing in house, we simply get too much in donations from Google Ads to risk being randomly flagged with no recourse.
$3k/month to an agency to handle all the Google/Bing/FB ad campaigns and A/B testing and to deal with Google's automated BS gives us close to 10x the ROI.
This is something I've been acutely concerned about. I'm working on several side projects right now and I think I will want to try running ads for another one soon. Given that I don't have any power to my name and my emails to their support team seem to go nowhere, I wonder whether I'm completely shut out of their ads ecosystem now.
this is exactly my experience, after making 1$, Google blocked my AdMob account, I tried to communicate issue and sent multiple emails, tried to convince them I am not doing anything harmful, without any luck.
after one year I wanted to integrate Google ads into another my side project and my account was still blocked (I took down my first application and re-applied again without any success)
The post gave me hope that a change of perspective on Google might ease up my irritation and horror from it a little—if I see it as a clumsy old behemoth, instead of the pioneer of future tech that it's usually portrayed as, and which basically translates to ‘what cyberpunk warned about’.
(But then I remembered that it has literal databases of incredibly personal realtime info on billions of people, and lets police peruse locations of people that committed no crime.)
Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on.
"Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?" Anyone have more detail on this?
Only that I've seen similar on other sites (carrying Google ads, like very site). It stopped a couple of weeks ago.
I thought it might be a cryptohijacker but I dug thru elements, code & did some packet captures. I couldn't spot what the issue was - I couldn't even confirm it was ads.
I suppose this suggests some manner of "fairness" to Google's widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can't keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody's getting an unfair advantage.
I've never understood why media companies don't treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business.
I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.
For the same reason why newspaper ads are rarer these days I would guess - next to nobody goes to them for their ads so the prices demandable tend to be lower than commodity or harder to fufill.
Most medium to large media companies do have their own sales staff for online advertising! The problem generally is that they can't sell enough local/direct-sold ads at a high enough CPM to sell out their inventory. This is where they use something like AdSense, to fill in those gaps where they couldn't sell anything for a higher rate.
While I do think TechDirt is rather scummy as a self-proclaimed rumor-monger site (one step away from clickbait), Google is an actual problem actor. This is not the first company to suffer their cruel indifference and nonsensical automated moderation. grits teeth I hope this story reaches more eyeballs.
I wish more sites would add a Web Monetization tag so that I can support them passively with my Coil subscription. They will earn more from the time I spend on their sites than from viewing the ads.
Google would probably be happy if their ads ran only on sites that had only the site's own content. It wouldn't be surprising if Google de-monetized all sites that allow random users to submit comments.
Google's true customers are the people buying ads in the first place. They could care less about publishers.
Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.
Also, I'd love to see ad serving go back to direct sold simple images and links, with no tracking or programmatic targeting involved at all. Obviously for 99% of websites this is impossible, but it'd be more equitable long term.
I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an <ad> html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadSo Google turned the filter sensitivity up to 11 just now huh? I don't get why techdirt insists that that is not about ideology.
Normally this would be a bad idea, but lots of people do it.
One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article?
It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.
It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.
My back of napkin math from another comment:
I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.
But this is a fair point, all the assumptions I make (eg. how many products a user uses, number of requests for support, etc.) are hypothetical and might be incorrect if this was actually implemented. Based on my judgement though, while variable might change, the end numbers will probably remain the same.
However, more importantly: going in with a "we need to support this" mindset alters incentives. Suddenly, useless error messages and lacking documentation aren't okay any more.
A different approach to solve the issue, if it even exists at that scale: make them pay for it. If you want service, pay $10. That's more than enough cover Google's cost and it's cheap for anyone that really requires service because e.g. their account has been locked, or Google's systems have disabled ads on their site. At the same time, it's expensive enough that you don't get flooded with "why do you show me those videos on the front page?" requests.
For power users, I completely agree it might be the only feasible idea.
The closest parallel I can think of Amazon where there is cost of products involved (and >> $10 year I suspect) - they do a good job but even they work hard to make sure you cant easily reach a person.
These apologies to mega corporate is very sad. I am disappointed in you.
A lot of the problem is that when Google screws up, there's no recourse. We don't hear much about when Google gets it right because those people's problems were solved. Surely some significant portion of the incidents you mentioned above fall into that category.
One would hope transparent, clear rules and enforcement would prevail. But ambiguity and silence are far less expensive.
I think the old internet was a lot better because the ratio of moderators to users was much, much higher and the moderators tended to be well informed enthusiasts that were usually running the site and had the ability / authority to fix anything / everything.
The easy solution to me is just add money. Let me pay on-demand for support. I've had a GSuite account for ages and never needed help with anything, but if my account got locked and I needed to talk to a human with the ability / authority to unlock it I wouldn't hesitate to pay $50-$100.
IMO part of the problem at Google is likely years and years of bragging instead of building and the tooling is probably absolute garbage to the point that a human wouldn't make a difference. That's why I say 3 mins seems low. I bet there are a lot of things that a human couldn't fix even if they wanted to.
It's pure speculation, but makes sense to me.
What happened to the math here? I'm not following this step?
Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus.
It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;
Also, it was probably a bad idea for Google and Facebook to be so cavalier while they destroyed print advertising (i.e. the press).
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, as they say.
They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves.
As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.
Not super positive but still.
And before you say "Aha! There you go assuming malice instead of incompetence" - keep in mind that Google has used this "our algorithm is objective so we don't manipulate what appears on our search pages" for years and years. It's the go-to strategy they use to appear neutral when called upon by governments.
Facebook has also attempted something similar in recent cases.
So, it's a kinda wink-wink nudge-nudge pact, that Google politically aligns with the Democrats, and the Democrats turn a blind eye on Google's monopolistic state.
There are plenty of examples, just try searching "Newsom Estate" on Google [0] vs DuckDuckGo [1] and count critical vs. approving articles out of first 10 results.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=newsom+estate
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=newsom+estate
I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Doubly so when you read the sources listed as they're all regurgitating the conspiracy-fodder into one another.
Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap').
So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.
DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second.
The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.
When people assume malice so often as you mentioned, it, at least intuitively, feels easier to fault human moderation than algorithms.
Algorithms offer a black box which protect against accusations of bias. If accused of bias, an algorithm's biases can just be labeled unintentional accidents, whereas a human's biases are malicious.
Do we really believe Google does not have the resources to hire and retain competent people? or are they willfully incompetent as a shield or cover for their malice
How many times can they play "oops our bad it was just a mistake"
It's not worth it for Google to fix rare edge cases; fixing them manually may even bias the models to cause problems for a greater number of sites. I am sure the models are trained as well as humanly possible; there are millions of dollars on the table at the fringes. Every employee's time is most valuably spent improving the models as a whole and not chasing down one-off edge-cases unless it's for a very high profile client. I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists).
Accept AdSense for what it is; a highly-profitable-for-Google way to use ML to turn HTTP into $$$. It will not work for every site, only 99.99xx% of them.
Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?
That's really easy to understand.
Humans cost money, algorithms are free.
Also, Google is full of the kind of people that 'don't understand humans' and 'understand algorithms very well'.
To Google, the answer to all of life's problems is probably 'an algorithm'.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.
The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service.
From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.
There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this.
Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.
To mis-quote Arthur C Clarke, any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream.
There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.
We have tried a lot of different advertising networks and sadly we have found none that's even in the same ballpark as AdSense (revenue wise). Advertising on the web is a shit show.
Where google has all of them beat is payment terms - net 21 is hard to beat.
They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long.
My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned.
And it's been that way since. No recourse. Just ... shut out.
This was a site with 100% user-generated content. If Google can't handle something like that, well ...
Which is why I stated that they should be run secondary to AdSense. At least they'd be ready to go when Google decided to shut Techdirt down.
Something is better than nothing.
I'm talking $0.01 - $0.05 CPM when Adsense was averaging ~ $3
There are two companies that could have helped minimize Adsense's monopoly but decided not to: Microsoft and Facebook.
It seems obvious in hindsight that the acquisition would kill competition but at the time, it didn't seem so. Like right now, in hindsight, Facebook's acquisition of instagram should be blocked - at the time it looked risky.
Same with Google's acquisition of youtube.
Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article would be, "Why is Techdirt closing down?". Their support page[0] lists 8 different revenue sources other than Google Ads.
And this is precisely the type of diversity that you want. Signing up for 5 different ad networks isn't really good diversity, because:
A) your different revenue streams are cannibalizing each other (there's a limit to how many different ad networks you can shove on the same page), so you can't grow your revenue as you diversify,
but more importantly,
B) many of the factors that affect one ad network (ad blocking, political pressures and privacy laws, fundamental inability to moderate well) will affect all of them.
It's not good to have 5 different revenue streams that can all simultaneously be destroyed by the same event. In that scenario you've increased complexity, but you haven't gotten a significant gain in reliability. On the other hand, pulling in money from advertising, Patreon, merchandise, product commissions, and even Kickstarter campaigns means that no single event will ruin your site.
I think it's important for people looking to diversify income streams to think about what each new income stream offers, rather than just duplicating an existing stream X times. I don't see any advantage in having 5 different frameworks for serving ads on a single site. I see a lot of advantages from setting up a Patreon on the side and selling podcast ads outside of your site.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/pages/support.php
Sure, Techdirt is hedging its bets and saying it might turn Google Ads back on eventually. But the account issues they're talking about aren't going to go away; there's nobody you can yell at with Google to make their moderation suddenly better.
I still want to push the idea that if you're diversifying your income, you should actually diversify it, not just have multiple accounts in the same field. There are independent issues that might effect one ad network and not another, sure. Those independent issues also won't affect podcast ads or product sponsorships.
In other words, redundancy != diversity.
Not to say redundancy is useless, of course. But it really doesn't sound like redundancy is Techdirt's problem here, it sounds like they're disillusioned with page ads in general.
"Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose" reads one.
While I have NO IDEA what that's about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it's because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I've read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever.
Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?
We've reported it, never heard back from Google. It went away after a few days each time, and hasn't happened in two or three years, at least not to any site I'm involved with.
Then the next day it's fine.
I really wish Congress' investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse.
Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.
Tort is very important for a functioning free market. The government just doesn't have the capability to police everyone, and civil court allows the people to police each other. Which exactly why large corporations move to eliminate their civil liability with users.
Playing the guessing game is not helpful. In my experience, things just go dark and you get very little or no helpful messaging about resolving the problem.
In my experience, you can usually find something that COULD be the cause by digging through analytics/reports, if you can demonstrate that you took positive action on this, and get it infront of the right support people, they can sometimes help you out and ask for your account to be re-evaluated. You will never, ever find out if this is the reason they disabled your account in the first place though.
Then, prepare for your account to be paused again.
So my attitude is pretty simple: Google can fuck off. They can't even fix their own properties and will ban you for their inability to do so.
As a seller of advertising space, to what extent is Google obligated to fill your inventory? How reliant are you on assumptions about whether they will and how much?
Like in Gmail Google ads "pretend" to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails.
(Sure there is a small Ad label but it's indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject)
Similar things can be observed fruit custom page/domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.
They also made it seem like I was some cyber criminal by suggesting that if I tried to create another account, they would automatically take that down too.
This is what a monopoly looks like.
What are you looking for that it or others don’t offer?
I didn't test this one.
Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.
Any insight on what a reasonable amount of traffic amounts to based on your experience?
I don’t remember specifically but I feel like we probably moved off Adsense when we were around 50k uniques/mo, but for a fairly specific niche.
One idea is to investigate who advertises on similar sites and examine their traffic/rates to see where you match up.
Big red flag. If you are connecting random people via video chat you open yourself to all sorts of abuse. I'm not saying that it is happening on your service, just that advertizers (and therefore google) are wary of videochat.
I doubt it had anything to do with the video chat aspect though.
This is the link they pointed me to in their suspension email https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/2375414 Given that I received no warning, they must have suspended me for an "egregious violation" of which they define five:
- Circumventing systems
- Counterfeit
- Promotion of unauthorized pharmacies
- Unacceptable business practices
- Trade Sanctions violation
I am really curious what their algorithm saw in my little chess website that suggests that I'm peddling pharmaceuticals, counterfeiting money, or selling banned technology to unsavory regimes. Heck, I don't even accept payments!
My best guess is that their algorithm panicked because I have that automatic redirect to a new unique URL when you click to start a new game. Apart from that, I have no idea what it could possibly be.
> Google Ads counterfeit vs. DMCA/Copyright/Pirated products
> Counterfeiters mimic the trademark brand features, rather than copying the product itself (software, books, artwork, movies, etc.).
Couldn't have been.
I left Google's indexing system 10 years ago, but back then, I made some inelegant workarounds to prevent these features from breaking duplicate page detection. I'm nearly certain the code I wrote has all been replaced with something Chrome-based, but I'm just trying to think of things that could trip up page analysis.
I could see how very rare patterns that are typically used to intentionally trip up page analysis might put your pages on some bad actor list. I really have very little idea how these auto-detection systems are implemented, and these are wild guesses, but they're hopefully better than nothing.
It's reassuring to hear that a former Google engineer shares my same suspicions as to why this happened. Thank you.
$3k/month to an agency to handle all the Google/Bing/FB ad campaigns and A/B testing and to deal with Google's automated BS gives us close to 10x the ROI.
Google might prefer to get broken up for monopoly before the racketeering cases get started.
after one year I wanted to integrate Google ads into another my side project and my account was still blocked (I took down my first application and re-applied again without any success)
(But then I remembered that it has literal databases of incredibly personal realtime info on billions of people, and lets police peruse locations of people that committed no crime.)
"Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?" Anyone have more detail on this?
I thought it might be a cryptohijacker but I dug thru elements, code & did some packet captures. I couldn't spot what the issue was - I couldn't even confirm it was ads.
I suppose this suggests some manner of "fairness" to Google's widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can't keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody's getting an unfair advantage.
I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.
It would indeed be surprising. Also unfortunate and counterproductive.
As with many sites that put competent effort into thoughtful moderation, some of Techdirt's best content shows up in article comments.
Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.
I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an <ad> html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.