HN Explorer

My Adsense story - 1 billion impressions and shut off with no explanation

18 points by ilovecars ↗ HN
Since Adsense has been a big topic lately, here's my story:

I've been using Adsense on WreckedExotics.com (a gallery of exotic car crash photos) since 2003. Have served almost 1 billion impressions during this time.

Recently, Adsense shut me off saying that the photos were depicting "violence".

I understand that there are injuries and sometimes death involved in these accidents, but I never show any gore or people, simply the vehicles themselves. Nothing different than what newspapers publish of car accidents.

All of my emails asking for clarifiction have gone unanswered, they keep pointing me to their TOS, which doesn't answer why a picture of a wrecked vehicle is considered violent.

I can understand if they don't want Adsense ads next to photos of accidents where injuries occurred, but the thing that I'm dissapointed about is the lack of answers. You would think that having a 10 year relationship with a company would warrant some minimal explanation at least, and why all of a sudden does my site not qualify after 10 years of no problems.

12 comments

[ 11.4 ms ] story [ 1068 ms ] thread
cft
Given the average eCPM of $1.00-2.00 from AdSense, that account earned between $1m and $2m in its lifetime. This is probably the only company in the world that can shut down such a high earning account with a template no-reply email with no explanation and no recourse for even a simple phone call. This is what monopoly means in practice. Such a Shame!
ilovecars
I don't want to get into revenue figures, but yes, the site has a cult following and while not attracting high CPM rates, it was earning decent enough revenue.

Again, I'm not mad that they decided to turn the ads off - I can respect their decision if they feel it's not appropriate, but it's the fact that I didn't get any decent explanation on what I needed to change. It just feels very disrespectful after such a long and prosperous relationship.

dchuk
It's not a monopoly in practice, it's terrible customer service in practice. There are tons of different ad networks to work with, Google isn't the only option, and Google has the right to shut off any publisher who they deem violate their T&C agreement.

It's a shitty situation, but it's not a monopoly example. It's just a huge company who doesn't really give a damn about any one publisher.

ilovecars
Yeah, I agree, it's not a monopoly. But they do have the most advertisers, so the alternatives aren't as good (for now, at least).
ig1
Both AOL Advertising and Tribal Fusion have huge display ad businesses (both reaching >500million people) with vast number of advertisers.

Many large content company only use Google for remanent advertising as the Google CPM is often pretty poor compared to other options.

jbwyme
I've had such a terrible experience with AdSense. My account was locked with $10k in the account and the only explanation they gave was "click fraud". Had I been committing click fraud I would have shrugged it off and moved on BUT there was nothing fraudulent going on at all. The account got frozen and the money I'd earned was lost. AdSense certainly acts like a monopoly and it's extremely frustrating. Now I cannot even use AdSense for any future projects which unless I'm running a high-traffic site severely limits my advertising prospects.
ilovecars
yeah, sorry to hear that. The moral of the story: Try to avoid relying on one company as your main source of revenue, you never know what can happen.
dotborg
like AdSense bans are anything new, yet another news about it on HN, coincidence or..?
ig1
It seems feasible to me that a reasonable person could see a gallery of the "worst car crashes" as violent, your definition or mine of violent could vary but it does fall under the bounds of what people could understand that term to mean (i.e violence doesn't only mean harm to people).

Glorifying car crashes is definitely in an iffy area (you have to remember that in some places it's not unheard off for people to steal and crash cars for fun).

ilovecars
I understand that. My complaint isn't that they labeled it "violence". My complaint is that they did not give me an explanation and they refuse to clarify which photos constitute "violent" images. Basically, no response from them.

This, after I had been using them since the inception of Adsense with no problems. They even used me as a case study a few years ago where they sent Adsense employees to my house to watch me use the Adsense interface for usability purposes.

It just leaves a bad taste when they treat their "partners" this way. I just want to speak with someone who can clarify my situation, that's all.

xSwag
Similar story here, although I'm happy I got had this unpleasant experience with my first big website and learnt not to use them ever again.

This was my first website, over 2 years it had around 80M impressions and then suddenly, one day, everything gone. I was actually planning to drop out of school to continue with it as I had days where I was making $500-600 per day. Took a critical hit and the site actually fell through due to it. Fortunately, it happened before I dropped out and I'm happy about that, I try to avoid all ad networks now and try for private sponsors.

cheae
Just curious, why there are still adsense units in your site.