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Banned from Google AdSense – 70k gone, no explanation

36 points by naturalauction ↗ HN
I'm working on an app that lets people create and talk to chat-bots (https://chai.ml/). It's pretty expensive to host so we decided to run mobile ads using Google AdMob starting in early June to cover some of our costs.

On the 7th of July, we got an email saying "detected invalid traffic or activity on your account." That same day we submitted an appeal and worked transitioning to a new ad partner.

We spoke to our contact at Google Ads who told us 'Trust & Safety is bound not to give any specifics out as far as policy infringement, but I'm hoping to get some sort of feedback. All I have read is "account abuse."' they have since stopped replying to us.

On the 13th of July we got an email stating "after taking into consideration the information that you have provided, we have confirmed that we are unable to reinstate your publisher account. Please note that your account will not receive further payments."

We've been limited in the past but it's always been resolved in under a week with no feedback on how we should fix any issues.

We were serving ads to our users for over a month and relying on that $70,000 that we expected to get paid (~50k for June and ~20k for July) For that to be taken away from us with no transparency is extremely frustrating (the only thing Google have told us is that we had "invalid traffic").

Does anyone know if there's anything else we can do to solve this issue?

20 comments

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techdragon
I’m just going to say … it’s fucking atrocious that Google can be in a business relationship worth 70k, owe another business seventy thousand dollars, and they can just go “you know what, we don’t owe you shit, and we’re not going to even tell you why”.

This sort of shit should be illegal. Google for all intent except the legal obligation, in a legal relationship pertaining to the money you helped them make, they should not be able to fuck people over like this.

PaulHoule
My first take is that making $50k your first month is pretty quick growth and looks suspicious. Also, something chatbot-based sounds a lot like spam content generation and that's something Google monopolizes for itself.

(I'd say at least half the time that somebody is complaining about unfair treatment by Adsense they are really guilty and trying to defend themselves like the murderer in an episode of Columbo.)

naturalauction
For context our ads are run entirely on mobile (have updated the post to reflect that). We had an initial consultation with them before turning on ads and they even gave us an estimate. Our implementation was pretty simple too, we just sometimes showed the user an ad when before they could chat with a bot.
is_true
I got banned for something than I think is related, showing ads with little content around.

Google loves to make people spend time skimming text to gather what they need.

Gtex555
Even if this is true, google shouldn't be able to determine that on their own and keep your money , such a system can be so easy to abuse as we have seen with copyright owners and the youtube content ID system.
88j88
Seems like a lot of money for adsense to pay out- How much traffic was the site seeing?
duped
Call a lawyer and sue them. $70k is way over the threshold I'd choose to file a lawsuit.
whakomatic
This is classic Google. You run for 45 days or so then they do an automated “review” and if they don’t like your results they ban you and keep the money. No information and no appeal is possible.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
justhw
They took $10k from us a while back for similar reasons.

We just signed up with a completely different account (with vpn) and fixed the concerns and made 10x more.

You gotta play the game with Google.

faangiq
Quick look at your app and it’s not really surprising…
ipaddr
Automated/generated content is against their policies.
peanut_worm
They took away my first 200 dollars I made on a website when I was in middle school
rasz
It took me 1 second to determine the reason, so your post is disingenuous at the very least. You bought ads to steer people into your chatbot page serving ads, where you can talk to a "boyfriend", or "step mom" with default prompt being "Please don't tell daddy about this...".

It takes 2 (TWO) prompts for "step mom" chatbot to try get into my pants.

>It would probably be easier if I could just take it off you

Hilarious!

Great product, especially if you manage to combine it with some sort of imagegen. But you can not expect to serve Google ads on this, or buy google ads for it.

drakonka
As immature as it is, I found Boyfriend (Breakup) pretty amusing:

Bot: Hey, I think we need to talk.

- sup

Bot: About the break-up

- what breakup?

Bot: The one you and I had this morning

- I don't know what you're talking about

Bot: You were screaming in pain at the top of your lungs

- Oh yeah, that. What about it?

Bot: Well, I guess I just wanted to make sure you're ok

- Oh yeah dude no problem

Bot: Ok good

- Alrighty then.

Bot: Do you want to come over?

kypro
I'm feeling irritated just reading this. I have no idea why anyone would rely on Google for anything business-critical at this point - GPC, AdSense, Gmail, Drive, etc - I don't trust them.

This is one of worst, but I see posts of a similar nature to this here multiple times a week. At this point if you decide to do business with Google you should do so expecting this type of crap.

Unfortunately I doubt there's anything you can do to resolve this. Based on previous stories like this your best chance is just to kick up enough of a fuss that someone at Google might notice and decide to help out.

scottydelta
Well there are no other programs like AdSense which has similar payouts because of how big Adwords' market is.

As someone who was banned from AdSense a decade ago arbitrarily, I have never thought about developing any projects which depends on Ad revenue because it's just not worth it since other Ad publishing platforms don't come anywhere close to AdSense payouts.

gwnywg
I'm sorry to read about your bad experience, it reinforces my opinion that to have business model relying on Google (or AWS or whoever else) will lead to such business to be at risk of being terminated with no reason provided or no route to defend it...
txt-me
I have a similar problem with Adsense, and even after 10 years trying to reapply the same website they refused because of the past violation. Sad but funny that they didn't even know the reason of the ban, so they asked me to show the original email they had sent me 10 years ago, which I didn't have. And without this email they couldn't continue the conversation.