It's frightening that this would happen to a company that actually has a relationship with google in as much as having an account rep. Those of us nobodys who are just running generic ads with no personal contact would have no recourse at all.
I will say though, in every one of these cases there is always a little something odd. You never read about this happening without some small thing that was wonky about the setup. In this case there's a mention of the personal site without any details of what that is. I'd be curious to know what that was.
That policy is not compatible with keeping the seedier side of the internet in the dark about the algorithms used, which is why Google doesn't do that. (You can disagree with this, obviously, but Google does have its reasons.)
Sorry, can you explain a little more about this? How would e-mailing the account holder and telling them what they did wrong reveal the structure of the algorithm?
If you're trying to scam Google (e.g. via click fraud), being told exactly how you were detected is rather useful if you want to be more successful next time.
But the user here is not asking for their detection methods. Just a notice that something was detected at all would suffice I think.
Then the user can at least say "Ops, busted!" or "Damn somebody is sabotaging my Adsense" and either do something to fix it or deactivate his/her account.
It's especially curious that no such notice was given considering that he was in pretty regular contact with an account representative.
The problem is that they don't have any rights. Google makes the rules for Adsense and you need to follow them. You could try to sue them in court, but do you really want to spend thousands of dollars and waste all kinds of time?
Something similar happened to me with Amazon. They kicked me off, never gave me a real reason, had automated responses, and now just ignore me. They also held $5000 for 3 months. I guess with 100% feedback and no complaints, they need to worry about me scamming them.
You never think that if you are following all the rules that something like this will happen to you, but it will. I now will not base any income off of third-parties.
It might be nice for some secondary income, but the risk is too high that they will destroy your revenue stream.
It's sick that so many people make these companies thousands and thousands of dollars/month and they can't even give them the common courtesy of a real person to talk to when problems like this arise.
The only reason they can get away with it is because they are a de facto monopoly.
Perhaps having a "right" is too strong of word. But I think anyone that has been told their account is banned because of some generic "risk" would want to know exactly what rule they violated... particularly if $40k is at stake. And while Google may be well within their right to just ban the account and never speak to the account holder again, then EVERYBODY needs to know that this can happen without warning and without recourse. I would imagine that the more people this happens to and the more people that know it, the fewer people would even start down that path.
The real shame is that it is more likely to scare off more legit accounts than fraudsters. People with fraud (or gaming the system) in mind are just going to keep creating accounts and collecting as fast as they can before it gets shut down... and then move on and do it again.
The blog links to a screenshot of the email - http://i.imgur.com/wWyNd.png - which says the personal site was guitarhero-5.com. But even if that is related to this somehow, they said "your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads."
The site referenced was a small content site I made to drive Amazon referrals for Guitar Hero 4 pre-orders. It was SEO'd and at the top of the search results for "Guitar Hero 4" at the time so it generated quite a bit in affiliate revenue but almost nothing in terms of Adsense.
They never told me what was wrong with it but if I had to make a guess it might have been flagged as a "Made for Adsense" site since it was pretty light on content. And as mentioned I removed the ads from it without as much as a rebuttal.
It was a no-brainer since it was so small-time compared to Hatchlings.
No but Google Plus was released only a couple of months after this ordeal started. We would have loved to have been a part of the launch of their platform.
This is a textbook example of why it's never smart to hinge one's profitability upon the whims of another company.
I've been down these paths with Adsense, EPN, and others and I learned the hard way that affiliate programs and ad revenue can be booming one day and gone the next.
Now I only build PaaS and SaaS sites (not counting freelancing work on the side) and I'm a lot happier with a much more stable income from my web apps that is not dependent on the whims of anybody.
Actually, AWS is generally categorized as Infrastructure-as-a-Service--although it's added a number of higher-level services that are more PaaS-like. (EC2 and S3 are definitely IaaS level. Elastic Beanstalk is pretty much a PaaS. Other services are in-between.)
Neither did I 6 years ago when I was making affiliate sites. When I realized that I didn't want to play that game I buckled down and learned to code...
That's the smart thing to do. You can still use all of the same marketing tactics as you would an affiliate program and the profits will be much larger.
This is actually an incredibly common practice of Google's, although in most cases they only make off with a few hundred dollars of ad revenue. I personally had it happen to me with a blog. They accused me a of "click fraud", disabled my account, and disappeared with the money they owed me. I did some research and found the same story repeated dozens of times. This has been going on for years.
Basically, Google's policies mean that if you don't like a website which uses AdSense for revenue, you can screw over the owner by sitting at their site and repeatedly clicking their ads. Google will see the "fraud", assume it was the site owner doing it, and shut down their account with little to no opportunity for appeal.
The second paragraph seems like something one could test. Have you?
Fraud detection is just hard. And my expectation is that for every legitimate friendly fire instance there are six or ten "marginal fraudsters" trying to spin their troubles with Google via blog posts like the one in the link.
I clicked on this thinking it would be a clear case of Google doing something "evil", and had to read through very carefully before I figured out that it was just another account freeze. Meh. If it's seriously $40k, then sue them and figure out what really happened in discovery. That would be a blog post I'd want to read.
>The second paragraph seems like something one could test.
I do not think it would be ethical to test it directly. But you don't have to search far to find people who have had their accounts crashed by angry exes.
Using $40k of a service (ad space in this instance) and then refusing to return the service providers calls and emails for over 12 months may not be "evil" per se but it's certainly on the malevolent side.
If it ruined someone’s livelihood then I'd say it's getting to be in the locus of what could well be described as "evil".
For a company to do this without apology demonstrates a pretty serious ethical deficit (assuming we have the full story before us).
You're taking the linked post on an awful lot of (IMHO, unverifiable and undeserved) faith. Yes, if everything they say is true, Google are jerks at best. But a blog post does not a reputation for honesty make, sorry. Even PayPal doesn't hit verifiably honest saints more than one a year or so.
Look, I don't know anything about "hatchlings", I'm just saying I'm not going to believe a post like this prima facie. They look like a garden variety spammy facebook game to me. That's a market pretty well known for playing SEO games and gaming ad systems.
Are these guys guilty or not? No idea. Fight it out, get some evidence, and then come to the public for support.
I agree that you shouldn't just take us at our word (and that's why we included as much documentation as we could to support our case).
But it would make it a heck of a lot easier to defend ourselves if Google had actually accused us of doing something wrong. To this day we're not even sure what we're alleged to have done to get our account banned.
There's no reason to think the story isn't true either. This is exactly the same scenario thousands have experienced over the years. Google sends the first automated e-mail, the user appeals, then gets a second canned response from Google. I don't think the wording of either email has even changed for years. Just look at how many others who have just posted here have had similar experiences. Look around the internet a bit and you will see that the number of people suddenly banned from adsense for life then stonewalled by Google is HUGE.
You would think, but I think they have always felt that a "tough on crime" mentality was necessary to inspire confidence in advertisers. This is a direct result of the imbalance of clout implicit to the long-tail/short-tail dichotomy of AdSense; Google packages a (relative) many dime-a-dozen content creators into a product (commodified ad space) which they sell to a (relative) few customers (advertisers). In addition, they can bet on content creators seeing the risk as low stakes (even though getting banned from a monopolistic ad network is anything but low stakes), while they can bank on advertisers seeing the risk as high stakes (which it is).
A better solution is not to use cost-per-click in the first place, instead relying on metrics that are harder to game, like unique visitors and page views. These are arguably a better reflection of an advertising space's value even without taking click fraud into account. That's what Project Wonderful did, and it has worked out well for some of its users, but its model is also more long-tail/long-tail, which I think hurts its profitability.
The reason that page views and unique views are harder to game is that they worth far less individually, while not being correspondingly easier to produce.
Say I'm a fraudster with a thousand IPs and a well-anonymized browser. If I'm paid per click, I can easily turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate clicks, which, depending on how I play my cards, could net me a few hundred dollars.
By contrast, if I'm paid per unique visitor, I can turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate unique visitors, which will very optimistically pull in maybe $5 (judging by Project Wonderful).
Now, neither of those schemes are optimal, but just about any improvement you suggest for the unique visitor model will reap ten times the rewards applied to the per-click model.
also, they are sure they are on the winning side. my understanding is that in most court proceedings, the winning side has the right to be fully reimbursed for legal costs occurred up to a reasonable point.
In the United States that's not normally the case; the "American rule" is that each side pays their own court costs, regardless of outcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...). There are specific statutory exceptions for certain kinds of lawsuits, such as Title VII claims and copyright cases.
Not in the U.S. The winner is entitled to legal fees from the user only extraordinary circumstances (i.e., where punitive damages or sanctions are also appropriate) or in family law cases (i.e., divorces).
>Please keep in mind that it's your responsibility to prevent invalid activity from occurring in your account, and this form does not absolve you of that responsibility.
Perfect. So it's your responsibility to prevent invalid clicks, even though pretty much any way you can think of to prevent them is explicitly forbidden by the TOS, but if someone does click your ads a bunch of times, let us know so we can steal all the money you've earned in the last month and shut you down.
Take them to a small claims court for damages (money, plus wasted hours dealing with it at your hourly rate). They will probably send some clueless legal intern without any proof.
The issue with google ads is that it only takes one bad vistor to get your ad sense account disabled.
Go ahead find a site with google ads start clicking the google ad over and over again until your IP is flagged (ads won't be displayed based on your IP). With in 30 days the sites ad-sense account will be disabled.
My assumption is that in 99% of the cases the revenue Google misses out on by terminating the accounts of site owners who experience the type of victimization is less than what they would spend in man-hours on investigating the matter to differentiate legitimate victimization from actual click-fraud.
If it is, then it would be relatively simple to automate this behaviour from a range of IPs and disable the accounts of hundreds, if not thousands of ad-sense customers.
Actually, what you have proposed is exactly the approach that some black-hat practitioners have used to hide click-fraud.
Some guys will setup a script to go to 5 sites (for example) and click ads on all of them. Their site will be one of the 5. All of the site owners make money, as do they, and because it's distributed across multiple sites, Google does not flag the activity as blatant click-fraud.
If you spend any time a BHW you will see these schemes over and over again, along with people claiming to make hundreds of dollars per day "on autopilot"....
That is similar, but I was meaning it less in terms of hiding click-fraud and more in terms of click-fraud-fraud, which would have a far more devastating effect on googles customers and if it was widespread enough would be horrendously bad for google as well.
I'm not advocating anything illegal, but this might be just what it would take for Google to fix their policies. Scrape a few million sites with Adsense, rent a Russian botnet, and spam-click ads until Google takes notice.
semi-OT, but I've occasionally wondered if these botnets for hire actually come with any sort of term of use/AOP. Certain behaviours are more likely to get the individual zombies identified and potentially notified and cleaned up, so you'd think the botnet herders would try to minimise (or charge a much higher rate for) those sorts of activities.
I'm also curious how actually deploying to a rented/borrowed botnet is done - what's stopping the client from using a payload which nukes and replaces the controller with one of their own, stealing it from the owner?
I don't know for sure, but perhaps the botnet provides higher level abstractions (DDoS, spam mailer, click bots, etc), or a sandboxed environment. "Heroku for botnets".
Not a clue, but Google's got enough of a braintrust to figure it out. They deal with SERP spammers fairly well; they can deal with clickfraud as well without punishing innocent people and not giving them a chance to fix it.
It appears that our account rep mis-typed the URL in that email reply. My site was actually guitarhero-4.com, here's the orignal email we got from them: http://i.imgur.com/2mcfo.png
I honestly don't think that site had anything to do with the ban though as there was over 2 years in between those two incidents.
Don't be so sure. Google has been known to ban Adwords accounts for ads that were deleted years ago because the content of a domain that has obviously been allowed to lapse and been re-registered by someone else has changed.
He said he took it down and that Google said everything was ok.
"Debby assures us on February 12 that “your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads.” This is the only issue that has ever been raised by Google in regard to our account."
Are you implying that the Google rep was incorrect and that this issue ultimately manifested itself two years later?
Not trying to refute you, but how can that be the problem? From the email you cite,
"Please be assured that your Adsense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other Adsense ads."
The author of the blog post states after receiving that email he took the Adsense ads off. This was also in Feb. 2009 and the account was closed in April 2011.
Does the Adsense team (or whoever) go back and look at incidences from 2+ years in the past when looking for people to ban?
My apologies. The original comment referenced guitarhero-5.com, but apparently this was a typo by the Google affiliate and should have been guitarhero-4.com (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803746). This would completely invalidate my comment, prompting me to delete it, except that guitarhero-4.com is also a thin affiliate site - so the original point stands. But my post is indeed confusing, my apologies.
its hillarious you present valid evidence, and people vote you down. Google is evil.. rabble rabble. Yes this was just one case.. without hearing the full story .. this example just proves that theres more to the story.
says the guy that got banned from adsense for somehow violating TOS, and have been warned in the past of doing something they shouldn't have. Yeah.. im sure the story isn't skewed to benefit you at all.
That's the main problem with automating as much as possible, and having as few customer service reps as possible. It feels like talking to a brick wall when something non-standard happens.
If this issue gets resolved in light of the publicity it's now getting, it just further shows that the Google system is deeply flawed for it's users.
What else could Hatchlings have done to prevent this? I know people are saying, "don't rely on someone else for your profitibility", but if you are going to work with Google what other steps can you take?
He seems to have done all the right things:
1) Found an account manager.
2) Formed relationships with public google folks.
3) Opened discussions to further integration through continued sales.
Assuming that his accounting of the facts is accurate, he did do all of the right things. That's why the "Dont rely..." comments are relevant. The affiliate-program market (and that's all Adsense is - a unique form of affiliate program) is almost universally open to this type of abuse.
Would you want to work for a company where you never got to meet or talk to your employer, you never knew for sure how much your paycheck would be, or exactly when it would be mailed/deposited? That's what we all do when we signup for Adsense.
Posting under a throwaway account because I do not want Google to try and screw me over further.
Hatchlings will probably get their money back because this achieved some measure of popularity on a major site and this makes Google look like crap. If you're one of the thousands and thousands of small businesses that Google has screwed over, this is about the only way you'll ever get your money back because GOOGLE DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT STEALING YOUR MONEY AND DESTROYING YOUR BUSINESS.
Everybody that loves Google because they talk a nice game about a free and open society and release some open source projects and say nice things about doing no evil should realize that their customer service is practically non-existent on purpose so they can steal your money easier. The only way to get your money back is to make them look bad.
I hope more people publicize Google's actions in many of these cases so people would realize what a chance you're taking when you do any kind of business with Google.
And think...this is is a guy with an actual account manager at Google...how bad do you think they treat the average small business that just does a few hundred or thousand dollars of ads and depends on that money to pay people?
I lost my Adsense account two years ago, due to valid violations. This saddened me, and was the end of web development for me. The stats were my heroine.
Fast forward to Spring break of this year, I developed a few Android apps and one took off. I signed up for AdMob in early March.
I kept clean and got my fill of daily stats and was once again happy with my new home on the internet.
Fast forward a week and a half, I get an alert saying Admob accounts will be merged with Adsense, uh oh. I was generating decent income at this point, because let's face it, the Android market is just wide open.
I decided to make my second appeal to Adsense, 2 years later, asking for another chance and explaining my understanding of the previous violations. I noted my clean record on Admob and my apps as my reason for appealing.
6 hours later, my AdMob account is banned without any kind of notification. My wife looks over at me and wonders why I'm so sad at the laptop after 10 hours of class. It had become my daily habit to kiss my wife and check the AdMob stats. It's not actually about making money, it is something about watching the growth/lotto.
So, I have now given up on Android apps and just disabled all but the most popular one. I removed ads and cleaned up my last push.
I wish there was some type of leniency. My wife offered to make an account in her name and just take over my Android apps, but the initial thrill is gone. There is a looming realization of Google controlling the majority of online advertising and that one mistake will probably haunt me for many years/services to come.
When I was 12, I built apps to automate MMOs. I was making about $350/mo. from AdSense - not bad money for a kid my age - when my account was shut down on the last day of the billing cycle (ie., the day before they were going to send me a check).
After some initial disappointment I changed to a subscription model, which increased my profit by an order of magnitude and incentivized me to work a lot harder on creating a quality product. Because of this, I don't regard my AdSense shutdown as a bad thing. Knowing nothing about the sort of apps you make, I'd encourage you to try to explore more options to monetize them. Clearly a number of people were using your apps. A different approach to monetization may be just as thrilling and rewarding.
It was with adwords...it was back when I was just getting started and I did affiliate marketing. I promoted this weight loss clickbank book...it didn't pan out, so I paused the ads.
My mistake...TWO YEARS later, I get a notice that they've shut down the account with bots because apparently that type of advertising is no longer allowed. So my old approval got tossed...and my account got perma banned over something that happened 2 years prior.
I filed an appeal, and that got ignored.
So I just said screw it, and created a new account. If Google won't play by its own damn rules, and will apply rules retroactively, I don't see why anyone should follow the rule about no duplicate accounts.
So I just signed up for adwords with a po box and did everything via VPN to avoid getting banned for duplicate account(matched via ip address). And it worked just fine.
That's the thing, all this bullshit that Google does...only hurts legitimate publishers.
The black hatters(who these rules are actually supposed to be for) only get a slight slap on the wrist...since all they have to do is just pay $5 to get a legitimate approved Adsense/Adwords account. Then just continue doing whatever they were doing before.
This EXACT same thing happened to me and I always wondered why. I hadn't used my account for years, everything was off. Then out of nowhere I get an e-mail from Google saying my accounts banned. I didn't care because I'm not doing any advertising anymore, but it's got to suck for anyone who may be making part of their living from from ad revenue.
The most annoying thing about what happened to me was that the campaigns were OFF and when I was using Google Adwords AFAIK you could not delete campaigns, just pause them, so what else could I have done to avoid this?
If you could delete them, it was not made clear how to at the time, I seem to remember starting new (slightly different) campaigns because I couldn't completely delete old ones.
Well, at least if I want to try to get my account opened again, I'll have some alternate options beside the appeal system. Thanks for sharing your work around. :)
I had this exact same thing happen. I wanted to try out some advertising so I put up in $20 and an ad for some shitty clickbank book. Of course it went nowhere so I deleted the whole campaign and left it at that. I went back to check out adwords a year later and my account was banned. I tried to appeal but they just told me that the anyone who ever had those urls as ads were banned and there was nothing they were going to do about it. Now that I'm going to get into Android development I'm think I'm going to try what you did, different address, VPN, etc. I'm moving in the summer so it won't be so hard.
Other advertising solutions for Android apps often pay more in my experience anyway, like Millennial Media, for example. I don't know why offhand, maybe there are fewer apps on them, so advertisers end up paying more for fewer slots. There's also AdWhirl and Mobclix which can act as mediators farming out your slots to other networks as needed. They are all just about as easy as AdMob to integrate, which is pretty straight forward, since most ad libraries are basically just dropping an extra WebView into an app somewhere.
I appreciate the gesture of expediting the appeal process from one of our members. The fact remains that I cannot participate in the AdSense conversion in May. When it comes to Google and money, I might as well be a pirate trespassing in royal seas, unless it is Wallet!
It motivates me to push my custom app that avoids some permissions breaking on Galaxy Notes and S2s, Thanks!
I am downvoting you because this adds nothing to the discussion. While DDG may be a worthy search engine and a good alternative to Google as a search destination, it does not offer an alternative or a solution to the problem that is AdSense related.
Is it my imagination or have I seen many "Google Screwed Us" posts and never one "Google Made It All Right" posts? It seems to me to be the opposite of Amazon, where I've seen many glowing posts about CS and very few posts about things going incredibly bad.
Edit: Amazon is also relevant due to their Android app store and soon in-app purchasing. I expect them to start an ad network for apps too.
Amazon has an easy to find customer service that replies to your questions quickly and makes things right. Google makes it very hard to find or contact anyone. Unless they're selling your their site optimization services.
I'm sure Amazon spends way more money in keeping their customers happy. They seem to realize this is good for repeat business.
>Google makes it very hard to find or contact anyone. //
They make it pretty hard to initiate what should be a completely hands-off (for them) error report too.
For example on Google Shopping they virtually always lie about the purchase price for goods that you find, then the top listed suppliers also lie about the price too. There's no [simple, visible or accessible] way to report either situation.
From Google's POV this should be an automated system. Once complaints breach n then check that the listed lowest price equals the "best" price of those listed by suppliers. If not then correct the lowest price returned for that query.
If complaints for a retailers price for a good breach m then scrape the on-page price (preferably using an anonymous IP) and compare with the retailers reported price on G Shopping. If there is a difference correct the difference, admonish the retailer and decrease the retailers reputation score. When reputation score is below x remove the retailer and send them a "naughty-naughty" letter.
Why the advertising standards/trading standards people aren't issuing massive fines to Google and their associates for false advertising in this way I'm not sure.
I have liked Google for a long time but it seems that they really struggle when it comes to customer service. Hopefully, someone will realize that this is important, especially when money is at issue, and do something about it.
It's just human nature to put more energy into it if you are being screwed over. I think product ratings have the same problem (unhappy customers more likely to comment than happy customers).
Hmmm? Both Google and Amazon are known for being good to their customers and screwing over their suppliers. Its just that most of us are a customer of Amazon and a supplier for Google.
So, you should balance this. There are lots of people out there that do well serving ads. It really depends on your product and your alternative avenues to revenue. It is a cautionary tale, but you shouldn't close the door because of that.
"I realize that this probably wasn’t done maliciously and that we were probably caught up in some algorithm gone awry"
I realize the diplomatic and empathic intent here but to me the whole episode is really damning if this is how they handle customers. Depriving people of payment for services rendered goes several steps beyond plain old shitty customer service.
Wow, this makes Paypal look like angels. I suppose we are just starting see the effects of ad monopoly. Once a few more alternatives are taken away, there will be no where to hide.
When Google inevitably smooth this over to avoid the bad PR, just spare a thought for the hundreds of smaller sites who don't have the option to generate that kind of press (Google screwed me out of $50 on my blog about kittens doesn't have the same ring to it)
Unfortunately, this is a reality of using AdSense.
I have never encountered anyone at Google that is malicious and/or gleeful about this happening. The lack of response comes down to the fact that Google would rather make sure they get all bad actors and throw out some good than be more lenient and let some bad actors stay.
There are tens of thousands of AdSense spammers that try to take advantage of the system. 30-40% of impressions on Google Content Network ads (which run on AdSense) are complete junk. These impressions are via sites that take advantage of how easy it is to get in to make a quick buck before Google catches them.
The ecosystem perpetuates itself because Google's priority is to maximize overall reach in the market: the more people using AdSense, the more impressions they get and the more people cookie'd for behavioral data. There is little concern with banning people unjustifiably as they have a different priority.
Hatchlings did the right thing by diversifying and if you rely on AdSense, then you should to. Make sure you work with several networks (many pay better anyway) and look for other sources of revenue. This is what separates the sad stories from successes.
> The lack of response comes down to the fact that Google would rather make sure they get all bad actors and throw out some good than be more lenient and let some bad actors stay.
If that's indeed their attitude, then they deserve to burn long and hot over this shit. And nothing excuses a shutdown in communication, period.
The lesson (to me) is "don't rely on AdSense for any make/break percentage of your revenue."
Agreed. I've had several bad experiences with Google's AdSense and it was a real pain in the ass to deal with them. They suspected one of my accounts of click fraud and it took almost 2 years of back and forth to finally get my money back. Even after all of that, they never reinstated my account.
My general attitude is the same, "Don't rely on Google for anything in which some kind of monetary relationship is involved." It's just not worth it - ever.
The problem is, that Google's behavior creates a culture of cheating. When things become so obviously unfair, people are increasingly forced to solve the problems in "other" ways. While their actions may make sense in the short run (i.e. its just a few annoying web"masters"), the long term effects of being perceived as an unfair institution that is okay to trick seems to be more severe.
until you hear both sides of the story, you can't assume they are playing by the rules. You can only assume there was something they were doing that google felt violated their terms. Really you think google would screw someone over 40k. Its chump change.
Why would google sooner disable a site showing ads and remove all revenue streams, than simply stop showing ads to "repeated" violators (based on IP, or whatever else they use to detect clickfraud) on that site, and only refund money made by THAT SECTOR the clicks came from?
Presumably, Google assumes that the account owner is the person or entity committing the click fraud and will find ways to continue perpetrating the fraud if only an IP or range is blocked. It's probably much less of a headache to just nuke an account than play a game of cat and mouse with fraudsters.
Posting from a throwaway handle, so that there is no way that Google would track me down.
Our company uses AdSense, and we have not been disabled so far. Our monthly revenues are much larger than Hatchling's. We have user-generated content. Despite our MOST extensive, multi-tier keyword-based content screening system, we are terrorized by Google weekly, from noreply address, that AdSense ads are disabled on this or that user's page, due to various violations found (often in the content in obscure languages, e.g. Hungarian , Finnish, Turkish), threatening to shut down the whole account. We are aware that the account can be shut down at any moment, and have been diversifying our ad revenue component for the last couple of years, using CasaleMedia, TribalFusion, Adbrite, taking conscious cuts in ad revenue compared to AdSense in exchange for security. Those companies actually care about your revenue.
DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not!
AdSense is only a good idea either if your revenue is negligible, or if you are a highly public high profile client like MySpace, where they KNOW that they cannot get away without serious negative PR.
On my opinion, this is why Google Payments never took off: they used the same smart-ass approach to shut down merchant accounts, knowing when a merchant was about to commit payment fraud before it was actually committed. In the case of sale of physical goods, an account termination could be much more harmful, so people stuck with PayPal, no matter how imperfect it was.
I don't understand. If you're smart enough to shut down an account before it does anything fraudulent, then you have no conceivable excuse not to pay the balance out when you close the account.
No excuse, simple theft. Google steals millions of dollars every year from AdSense 'partners' who have done absolutely nothing wrong. Google's AdSense forums are overflowing with stories where they've stolen from publishers over the slightest of infraction (and many cases in which absolutely nothing occurred).
Their method of AdSense theft is one of the greatest rackets in the history of the Internet.
Also try ValueClickMedia, in the past they paid a lot better for me than the alternatives you mentioned. Get someone on the phone though, don't try their automated application process.
Do you happen to use an ad manager that distributes traffic among all of those ad networks? I currently use Google's DFP and I realize that's not exactly all that safe either.
Feel your pain. I had a nicely successful social media property built around Twitter. It had a very large semantic system as part of how it worked, but I had to write an extraordinarily elaborate language filter to span every common language in order to keep Google from slapping me for the smallest of inappropriate language violations. In the end, the site got blocked over the word "vagina" in dutch appearing one time on one page (out of millions of pages).
Google simply doesn't give a shit. When the government eventually busts their chops, there isn't going to be much sympathy to be found. Their attitude makes them seem like raging jerks.
"DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! "
This is really a classic business issue. There is always a tradeoff between putting all your eggs in one basket (say what zynga did with facebook initially) and having a diverse customer base. Same goes for relying on a single vendor or source.
Obviously if you can diversify it makes sense. But it all depends on the revenue hit your take by doing so. Extra money that you earn can be banked toward the future as well.
Right, but the wise thing to do is to set up the other ad networks before Google shuts you down. Then you can just re-allocate percentages. Setting them up, optimising, etc requires time, so the best is to have the mix ready in advance.
You may want to read "Why I sued Google and won" [1]. The guy has a similar story to yours, sued Google for the revenue already earned, and won all of it (it was only ~$700).
> Despite Google's objections to what they perceived to be technical violations of their AdSense terms of service, they also had an entirely separate (but confusingly similar-sounding) program called AdSense for Domains, which handled the exact problem I was trying to solve--that of using advertising to profit from "parked," or unused, domain names, much like putting a billboard on a vacant lot. Though AdSense for Domains was closed to the public for years, Google did finally open it up December 11, 2008, just two days after my account was cancelled. Had it allowed my company to join in the first place, I would have had no reason to create my own billboard using "normal" AdSense since Google would have already taken care of it for me, and no violation would have occurred.
"If Google would've let me into their private club I wouldn't have had to trespass in it" probably didn't sit too well with the judge.
I hate to suggest this. I repeat, I really hate to suggest this:
It is time for those affected to unite behind a push to initiate Congressional action against Google (and possibly others) for these practice. They are highly destructive and unfair. These companies ARE huge monopolies. They just can't be allowed to behave this way.
I am the first one to raise my voice against more government incursions into our daily lives. However, there are cases where very few options remain on the table.
Unless Google, eBay, Paypal and others who are committing these kinds of acts on a daily basis change their tune in a hurry I think that a collision with government action is unavoidable.
A united front with government backing is probably the only viable option.
alternatively, Google can be slapped with a class action lawsuit
I know their emails always say "we've refunded your money to the advertiser"...but has anyone seen proof of this? Any of you that advertise with Adwords Content...ever see a refund for any clicks?
So when they are lenient with policing ads they get sued for click-fraud and when they are strict then the government should intervene?! surly there must be a third option.
As I said in my response to you 23 days ago[0], we have to be very careful that whatever we ask Congress to do doesn't get warped into something that protects eBay, Google, and PayPal against smaller competitors, e.g. by imposing a mandatory per-customer cost that is untenable for startups.
In the case of AdSense, if such a measure proves absolutely necessary, perhaps the remedy should be as simple as requiring those disabled accounts who prove they are a real life human to be able to communicate with a real life human at Google to discuss the evidence against their account.
Absolutely agreed. In my opinion, Government is the least desirable option in all cases. It's a hatchet when you need a scalpel.
Yet, here we are, 23 days later (interesting that you remembered) having the same discussion. This is happening with far greater frequency than publicly exposed. I've seen it first hand. You have to wonder what Google's trail of destruction might look like.
In the end these are families and businesses that are being affected in very signifiant ways. If one were to want to play the populist card, you could also say that jobs might be lost (or not created) when Google takes actions that damage or destroy company revenue streams.
Also agree that it is not a simple problem to solve. That said, if the problem is too big for Google to deal with it then maybe they should stick with search and bow out of the ad serving business.
A company as large as Google can't be compelled to make changes by one or a few individuals voicing their concerns. This is the fundamental problem. If they were good netizens they'd jump at the opportunity to fix the problem, no matter how difficult it might be. Hire another 100 engineers and figure it out.
The threat of a force greater than theirs might just be the only reason to compel a company as powerful as Google to make changes. That, perhaps, is my greater point.
I really don't want to see government regulate any of it. But I am not opposed to using government to force change or capitulation when few other options appear to be viable.
Let me also be constructive and suggest ways in which Google could make this process fair.
First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure.
New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place.
It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves.
During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical.
If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them.
One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem!
After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice.
If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action.
This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not.
This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site.
Once the revenue reaches zero ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice.
Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases.
Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it.
The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems.
Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin.
At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue.
Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%.
Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account.
I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem.
I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It's not fair.
My AdWords account was suspended for what turned out to be a simple and easy to make mistake.
One of my landing pages was mistakenly flagged as a bridge page. I suspended the campaign, tweaked the advertising in a way that (based on Google's own bridge page definition) should have been enough, and assumed the problem was resolved.
I decided to try something else, left the campaign stopped, and created a new one. The site for the new campaign was just my blog, so I didn't think it could create a problem. Suspended within an hour.
I learned from others who experienced the same problem that starting a campaign after one of your other campaigns is suspended without contacting Google will get your account suspended. It took an escalating campaign of contact across several Google and non-Google venues to get a response.
Some time later my account was reinstated. It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation and apology. Your proposed solution would have kept it from ever reaching the point of suspension.
It shouldn't take that much effort just to find out something you did was a problem. I couldn't stomach putting in the effort to create another campaign on AdWords after being unsuspended. Who knows what other trap I would fall into?
If Google is so bad at this, wouldn't a better approach be to start or support an alternative ad network that does what you want? You sound extremely confident that Google is doing a horrible job in this space, so a competitor should just be able to do better and eat their lunch. As far as I know, Google hasn't been accused of any anticompetitive behavior, so they're not stopping you. That would be much less radical than lobbying Congress for some vaguely defined "action".
I suspect you will find that once you get to a scale similar to Google's, you'll find yourself making similar tradeoffs. You could probably be a little better, but I don't think it's possible to be both forgiving and resilient against fraudsters.
EDIT: On rereading, this sounded a little bit passive-aggressive, so I've rephrased it a bit. Hopefully it comes across more as an observation and less like an attack now.
You could run the exact same fraud systems and policies, but also offer customer support. It's not the fraud systems that are preventing competitors, it's achieving the critical mass of advertisers to offer competitive ad fill and revenue rates. It doesn't matter if you're the friendliest company in the world if you can't provide enough ads to pay as much, or anywhere near, what Google will pay the same site.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadI will say though, in every one of these cases there is always a little something odd. You never read about this happening without some small thing that was wonky about the setup. In this case there's a mention of the personal site without any details of what that is. I'd be curious to know what that was.
Even still, it sounds like a gross over-reaction.
Then the user can at least say "Ops, busted!" or "Damn somebody is sabotaging my Adsense" and either do something to fix it or deactivate his/her account.
It's especially curious that no such notice was given considering that he was in pretty regular contact with an account representative.
Something similar happened to me with Amazon. They kicked me off, never gave me a real reason, had automated responses, and now just ignore me. They also held $5000 for 3 months. I guess with 100% feedback and no complaints, they need to worry about me scamming them.
You never think that if you are following all the rules that something like this will happen to you, but it will. I now will not base any income off of third-parties.
It might be nice for some secondary income, but the risk is too high that they will destroy your revenue stream.
It's sick that so many people make these companies thousands and thousands of dollars/month and they can't even give them the common courtesy of a real person to talk to when problems like this arise.
The only reason they can get away with it is because they are a de facto monopoly.
The real shame is that it is more likely to scare off more legit accounts than fraudsters. People with fraud (or gaming the system) in mind are just going to keep creating accounts and collecting as fast as they can before it gets shut down... and then move on and do it again.
The site referenced was a small content site I made to drive Amazon referrals for Guitar Hero 4 pre-orders. It was SEO'd and at the top of the search results for "Guitar Hero 4" at the time so it generated quite a bit in affiliate revenue but almost nothing in terms of Adsense.
They never told me what was wrong with it but if I had to make a guess it might have been flagged as a "Made for Adsense" site since it was pretty light on content. And as mentioned I removed the ads from it without as much as a rebuttal.
It was a no-brainer since it was so small-time compared to Hatchlings.
I've been down these paths with Adsense, EPN, and others and I learned the hard way that affiliate programs and ad revenue can be booming one day and gone the next.
Now I only build PaaS and SaaS sites (not counting freelancing work on the side) and I'm a lot happier with a much more stable income from my web apps that is not dependent on the whims of anybody.
A third service layer would be IaaS; Infrastructure as a Service.
(Sorry, couldn't help that :-D)
Basically, Google's policies mean that if you don't like a website which uses AdSense for revenue, you can screw over the owner by sitting at their site and repeatedly clicking their ads. Google will see the "fraud", assume it was the site owner doing it, and shut down their account with little to no opportunity for appeal.
Scripting that will only display the adsense advertisement once per IP visiting your site... yet guess what, Google disallows this practice!
Fraud detection is just hard. And my expectation is that for every legitimate friendly fire instance there are six or ten "marginal fraudsters" trying to spin their troubles with Google via blog posts like the one in the link.
I clicked on this thinking it would be a clear case of Google doing something "evil", and had to read through very carefully before I figured out that it was just another account freeze. Meh. If it's seriously $40k, then sue them and figure out what really happened in discovery. That would be a blog post I'd want to read.
I do not think it would be ethical to test it directly. But you don't have to search far to find people who have had their accounts crashed by angry exes.
Using $40k of a service (ad space in this instance) and then refusing to return the service providers calls and emails for over 12 months may not be "evil" per se but it's certainly on the malevolent side.
If it ruined someone’s livelihood then I'd say it's getting to be in the locus of what could well be described as "evil".
For a company to do this without apology demonstrates a pretty serious ethical deficit (assuming we have the full story before us).
Look, I don't know anything about "hatchlings", I'm just saying I'm not going to believe a post like this prima facie. They look like a garden variety spammy facebook game to me. That's a market pretty well known for playing SEO games and gaming ad systems.
Are these guys guilty or not? No idea. Fight it out, get some evidence, and then come to the public for support.
But it would make it a heck of a lot easier to defend ourselves if Google had actually accused us of doing something wrong. To this day we're not even sure what we're alleged to have done to get our account banned.
A better solution is not to use cost-per-click in the first place, instead relying on metrics that are harder to game, like unique visitors and page views. These are arguably a better reflection of an advertising space's value even without taking click fraud into account. That's what Project Wonderful did, and it has worked out well for some of its users, but its model is also more long-tail/long-tail, which I think hurts its profitability.
Surely page views are as easy to imitate as clicks (possibly easier). Unique visitors would be reasonably easy to game as well I'd imagine.
Say I'm a fraudster with a thousand IPs and a well-anonymized browser. If I'm paid per click, I can easily turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate clicks, which, depending on how I play my cards, could net me a few hundred dollars.
By contrast, if I'm paid per unique visitor, I can turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate unique visitors, which will very optimistically pull in maybe $5 (judging by Project Wonderful).
Now, neither of those schemes are optimal, but just about any improvement you suggest for the unique visitor model will reap ten times the rewards applied to the per-click model.
https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py?&conta...
Perfect. So it's your responsibility to prevent invalid clicks, even though pretty much any way you can think of to prevent them is explicitly forbidden by the TOS, but if someone does click your ads a bunch of times, let us know so we can steal all the money you've earned in the last month and shut you down.
Go ahead find a site with google ads start clicking the google ad over and over again until your IP is flagged (ads won't be displayed based on your IP). With in 30 days the sites ad-sense account will be disabled.
If it is, then it would be relatively simple to automate this behaviour from a range of IPs and disable the accounts of hundreds, if not thousands of ad-sense customers.
Some guys will setup a script to go to 5 sites (for example) and click ads on all of them. Their site will be one of the 5. All of the site owners make money, as do they, and because it's distributed across multiple sites, Google does not flag the activity as blatant click-fraud.
If you spend any time a BHW you will see these schemes over and over again, along with people claiming to make hundreds of dollars per day "on autopilot"....
I'm also curious how actually deploying to a rented/borrowed botnet is done - what's stopping the client from using a payload which nukes and replaces the controller with one of their own, stealing it from the owner?
I think we've found the problem...
[EDIT: original comment was: Looking at http://web.archive.org/web/20110203092609/http://guitarhero-... (via http://i.imgur.com/wWyNd.png), it appears that this "personal site" was a seedy affiliate site using a brand name without permission.
I think we've found the problem...]
I honestly don't think that site had anything to do with the ban though as there was over 2 years in between those two incidents.
"Debby assures us on February 12 that “your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads.” This is the only issue that has ever been raised by Google in regard to our account."
Are you implying that the Google rep was incorrect and that this issue ultimately manifested itself two years later?
"Please be assured that your Adsense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other Adsense ads."
The author of the blog post states after receiving that email he took the Adsense ads off. This was also in Feb. 2009 and the account was closed in April 2011.
Does the Adsense team (or whoever) go back and look at incidences from 2+ years in the past when looking for people to ban?
If this issue gets resolved in light of the publicity it's now getting, it just further shows that the Google system is deeply flawed for it's users.
He seems to have done all the right things:
1) Found an account manager. 2) Formed relationships with public google folks. 3) Opened discussions to further integration through continued sales.
Would you want to work for a company where you never got to meet or talk to your employer, you never knew for sure how much your paycheck would be, or exactly when it would be mailed/deposited? That's what we all do when we signup for Adsense.
Hatchlings will probably get their money back because this achieved some measure of popularity on a major site and this makes Google look like crap. If you're one of the thousands and thousands of small businesses that Google has screwed over, this is about the only way you'll ever get your money back because GOOGLE DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT STEALING YOUR MONEY AND DESTROYING YOUR BUSINESS.
Everybody that loves Google because they talk a nice game about a free and open society and release some open source projects and say nice things about doing no evil should realize that their customer service is practically non-existent on purpose so they can steal your money easier. The only way to get your money back is to make them look bad.
I hope more people publicize Google's actions in many of these cases so people would realize what a chance you're taking when you do any kind of business with Google.
And think...this is is a guy with an actual account manager at Google...how bad do you think they treat the average small business that just does a few hundred or thousand dollars of ads and depends on that money to pay people?
Fast forward to Spring break of this year, I developed a few Android apps and one took off. I signed up for AdMob in early March.
I kept clean and got my fill of daily stats and was once again happy with my new home on the internet.
Fast forward a week and a half, I get an alert saying Admob accounts will be merged with Adsense, uh oh. I was generating decent income at this point, because let's face it, the Android market is just wide open.
I decided to make my second appeal to Adsense, 2 years later, asking for another chance and explaining my understanding of the previous violations. I noted my clean record on Admob and my apps as my reason for appealing.
6 hours later, my AdMob account is banned without any kind of notification. My wife looks over at me and wonders why I'm so sad at the laptop after 10 hours of class. It had become my daily habit to kiss my wife and check the AdMob stats. It's not actually about making money, it is something about watching the growth/lotto.
So, I have now given up on Android apps and just disabled all but the most popular one. I removed ads and cleaned up my last push.
I wish there was some type of leniency. My wife offered to make an account in her name and just take over my Android apps, but the initial thrill is gone. There is a looming realization of Google controlling the majority of online advertising and that one mistake will probably haunt me for many years/services to come.
After some initial disappointment I changed to a subscription model, which increased my profit by an order of magnitude and incentivized me to work a lot harder on creating a quality product. Because of this, I don't regard my AdSense shutdown as a bad thing. Knowing nothing about the sort of apps you make, I'd encourage you to try to explore more options to monetize them. Clearly a number of people were using your apps. A different approach to monetization may be just as thrilling and rewarding.
entrepreneurship should be a mandatory high school course, along with media literacy and personal finance.
It was with adwords...it was back when I was just getting started and I did affiliate marketing. I promoted this weight loss clickbank book...it didn't pan out, so I paused the ads.
My mistake...TWO YEARS later, I get a notice that they've shut down the account with bots because apparently that type of advertising is no longer allowed. So my old approval got tossed...and my account got perma banned over something that happened 2 years prior.
I filed an appeal, and that got ignored.
So I just said screw it, and created a new account. If Google won't play by its own damn rules, and will apply rules retroactively, I don't see why anyone should follow the rule about no duplicate accounts.
So I just signed up for adwords with a po box and did everything via VPN to avoid getting banned for duplicate account(matched via ip address). And it worked just fine.
That's the thing, all this bullshit that Google does...only hurts legitimate publishers.
The black hatters(who these rules are actually supposed to be for) only get a slight slap on the wrist...since all they have to do is just pay $5 to get a legitimate approved Adsense/Adwords account. Then just continue doing whatever they were doing before.
This EXACT same thing happened to me and I always wondered why. I hadn't used my account for years, everything was off. Then out of nowhere I get an e-mail from Google saying my accounts banned. I didn't care because I'm not doing any advertising anymore, but it's got to suck for anyone who may be making part of their living from from ad revenue.
The most annoying thing about what happened to me was that the campaigns were OFF and when I was using Google Adwords AFAIK you could not delete campaigns, just pause them, so what else could I have done to avoid this?
If you could delete them, it was not made clear how to at the time, I seem to remember starting new (slightly different) campaigns because I couldn't completely delete old ones.
Well, at least if I want to try to get my account opened again, I'll have some alternate options beside the appeal system. Thanks for sharing your work around. :)
Won't google detect the same name on the CC or bank account?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/5969
If you use another ppc provider on your page, you might get penalties affecting your ranks http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Similar with affiliate links, http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Even though that's worst case scenario and might be a bit tendentious; there's no clear way to interpret what you can or can't do, or how google might interpret it.
It motivates me to push my custom app that avoids some permissions breaking on Galaxy Notes and S2s, Thanks!
I moved my adwords campain for other business sites since then and advocate it when I can.
Edit: Amazon is also relevant due to their Android app store and soon in-app purchasing. I expect them to start an ad network for apps too.
I'm sure Amazon spends way more money in keeping their customers happy. They seem to realize this is good for repeat business.
They make it pretty hard to initiate what should be a completely hands-off (for them) error report too.
For example on Google Shopping they virtually always lie about the purchase price for goods that you find, then the top listed suppliers also lie about the price too. There's no [simple, visible or accessible] way to report either situation.
From Google's POV this should be an automated system. Once complaints breach n then check that the listed lowest price equals the "best" price of those listed by suppliers. If not then correct the lowest price returned for that query.
If complaints for a retailers price for a good breach m then scrape the on-page price (preferably using an anonymous IP) and compare with the retailers reported price on G Shopping. If there is a difference correct the difference, admonish the retailer and decrease the retailers reputation score. When reputation score is below x remove the retailer and send them a "naughty-naughty" letter.
Why the advertising standards/trading standards people aren't issuing massive fines to Google and their associates for false advertising in this way I'm not sure.
Then again, have you had more success interacting with Google when running ad campaigns?
I was considering doing an ad based project until I read this.
I realize the diplomatic and empathic intent here but to me the whole episode is really damning if this is how they handle customers. Depriving people of payment for services rendered goes several steps beyond plain old shitty customer service.
I have never encountered anyone at Google that is malicious and/or gleeful about this happening. The lack of response comes down to the fact that Google would rather make sure they get all bad actors and throw out some good than be more lenient and let some bad actors stay.
There are tens of thousands of AdSense spammers that try to take advantage of the system. 30-40% of impressions on Google Content Network ads (which run on AdSense) are complete junk. These impressions are via sites that take advantage of how easy it is to get in to make a quick buck before Google catches them.
The ecosystem perpetuates itself because Google's priority is to maximize overall reach in the market: the more people using AdSense, the more impressions they get and the more people cookie'd for behavioral data. There is little concern with banning people unjustifiably as they have a different priority.
Hatchlings did the right thing by diversifying and if you rely on AdSense, then you should to. Make sure you work with several networks (many pay better anyway) and look for other sources of revenue. This is what separates the sad stories from successes.
If that's indeed their attitude, then they deserve to burn long and hot over this shit. And nothing excuses a shutdown in communication, period.
The lesson (to me) is "don't rely on AdSense for any make/break percentage of your revenue."
My general attitude is the same, "Don't rely on Google for anything in which some kind of monetary relationship is involved." It's just not worth it - ever.
Being perceived as an unfair institution hurts you weather it's true or not.
(And NO, I'm not saying that I think Google is an unfair institution. Ugh.)
Our company uses AdSense, and we have not been disabled so far. Our monthly revenues are much larger than Hatchling's. We have user-generated content. Despite our MOST extensive, multi-tier keyword-based content screening system, we are terrorized by Google weekly, from noreply address, that AdSense ads are disabled on this or that user's page, due to various violations found (often in the content in obscure languages, e.g. Hungarian , Finnish, Turkish), threatening to shut down the whole account. We are aware that the account can be shut down at any moment, and have been diversifying our ad revenue component for the last couple of years, using CasaleMedia, TribalFusion, Adbrite, taking conscious cuts in ad revenue compared to AdSense in exchange for security. Those companies actually care about your revenue.
DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! AdSense is only a good idea either if your revenue is negligible, or if you are a highly public high profile client like MySpace, where they KNOW that they cannot get away without serious negative PR.
Their method of AdSense theft is one of the greatest rackets in the history of the Internet.
Google simply doesn't give a shit. When the government eventually busts their chops, there isn't going to be much sympathy to be found. Their attitude makes them seem like raging jerks.
This is really a classic business issue. There is always a tradeoff between putting all your eggs in one basket (say what zynga did with facebook initially) and having a diverse customer base. Same goes for relying on a single vendor or source.
Obviously if you can diversify it makes sense. But it all depends on the revenue hit your take by doing so. Extra money that you earn can be banked toward the future as well.
I tried to log back in a few times over the years, and after about 4 or 5 years I was told that they no longer had any record of my account.
I signed up again (using the same email and personal information) without a hitch. I have been receiving checks for many months now.
For $40k, I'd sure look into it.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...
> Despite Google's objections to what they perceived to be technical violations of their AdSense terms of service, they also had an entirely separate (but confusingly similar-sounding) program called AdSense for Domains, which handled the exact problem I was trying to solve--that of using advertising to profit from "parked," or unused, domain names, much like putting a billboard on a vacant lot. Though AdSense for Domains was closed to the public for years, Google did finally open it up December 11, 2008, just two days after my account was cancelled. Had it allowed my company to join in the first place, I would have had no reason to create my own billboard using "normal" AdSense since Google would have already taken care of it for me, and no violation would have occurred.
"If Google would've let me into their private club I wouldn't have had to trespass in it" probably didn't sit too well with the judge.
As the cliché goes: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade."
It is time for those affected to unite behind a push to initiate Congressional action against Google (and possibly others) for these practice. They are highly destructive and unfair. These companies ARE huge monopolies. They just can't be allowed to behave this way.
I am the first one to raise my voice against more government incursions into our daily lives. However, there are cases where very few options remain on the table.
Unless Google, eBay, Paypal and others who are committing these kinds of acts on a daily basis change their tune in a hurry I think that a collision with government action is unavoidable.
A united front with government backing is probably the only viable option.
I know their emails always say "we've refunded your money to the advertiser"...but has anyone seen proof of this? Any of you that advertise with Adwords Content...ever see a refund for any clicks?
Yes
Yes, all the time. Here's what it looks like in the billing summary:
http://i.imgur.com/JVSVO.png
The alt text for the question mark graphic: "Your account has been credited for invalid clicks that escaped automatic detection."
In the case of AdSense, if such a measure proves absolutely necessary, perhaps the remedy should be as simple as requiring those disabled accounts who prove they are a real life human to be able to communicate with a real life human at Google to discuss the evidence against their account.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3697448
Yet, here we are, 23 days later (interesting that you remembered) having the same discussion. This is happening with far greater frequency than publicly exposed. I've seen it first hand. You have to wonder what Google's trail of destruction might look like.
In the end these are families and businesses that are being affected in very signifiant ways. If one were to want to play the populist card, you could also say that jobs might be lost (or not created) when Google takes actions that damage or destroy company revenue streams.
Also agree that it is not a simple problem to solve. That said, if the problem is too big for Google to deal with it then maybe they should stick with search and bow out of the ad serving business.
A company as large as Google can't be compelled to make changes by one or a few individuals voicing their concerns. This is the fundamental problem. If they were good netizens they'd jump at the opportunity to fix the problem, no matter how difficult it might be. Hire another 100 engineers and figure it out.
The threat of a force greater than theirs might just be the only reason to compel a company as powerful as Google to make changes. That, perhaps, is my greater point.
I really don't want to see government regulate any of it. But I am not opposed to using government to force change or capitulation when few other options appear to be viable.
First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure.
New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place.
It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves.
During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical.
If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them.
One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem!
After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice.
If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action.
This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not.
This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site.
Once the revenue reaches zero ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice.
Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases.
Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it.
The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems.
Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin.
At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue.
Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%.
Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account.
I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem.
I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It's not fair.
One of my landing pages was mistakenly flagged as a bridge page. I suspended the campaign, tweaked the advertising in a way that (based on Google's own bridge page definition) should have been enough, and assumed the problem was resolved.
I decided to try something else, left the campaign stopped, and created a new one. The site for the new campaign was just my blog, so I didn't think it could create a problem. Suspended within an hour.
I learned from others who experienced the same problem that starting a campaign after one of your other campaigns is suspended without contacting Google will get your account suspended. It took an escalating campaign of contact across several Google and non-Google venues to get a response.
Some time later my account was reinstated. It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation and apology. Your proposed solution would have kept it from ever reaching the point of suspension.
It shouldn't take that much effort just to find out something you did was a problem. I couldn't stomach putting in the effort to create another campaign on AdWords after being unsuspended. Who knows what other trap I would fall into?
I suspect you will find that once you get to a scale similar to Google's, you'll find yourself making similar tradeoffs. You could probably be a little better, but I don't think it's possible to be both forgiving and resilient against fraudsters.
EDIT: On rereading, this sounded a little bit passive-aggressive, so I've rephrased it a bit. Hopefully it comes across more as an observation and less like an attack now.