Making this kind of statements and then not providing any kind of proof is just pointless. No one has any reason to believe any of this and this can't therefore be considered a leak because it carries absolutely no value.
Let's think about this logically. Google takes 32% of every adsense click [1], so assuming an account makes $5,000/month, Google is making $2,352/month from that account. So by banning the account, they are making $5,000 one-time, and losing $2,352/month forever. No company is stupid enough to do that.
However, considering a site making $5,000 or $10,000/month is generating quite a few clicks, I think it makes perfect sense for any account reaching these thresholds to be manually reviewed to ensure they are valid sites. The quality of Google's clicks is one of its main selling points, and by cutting out spammy sites at the source it both improves the quality of its own program and at the same time removes a lot of the financial incentive to run a scummy site.
So my guess is these policies (or similar policies that involve manual reviews of sites) make perfect sense, are not illegal in any way, and this whole posting is as bogus as it looks.
Also obviously if Google reduces the pool of adsense publishers, the money is more likely to be spent advertising on Google properties, and Google will take 100% of that, rather than 32%.
If that was an ideal strategy they would have never opened it up to publishers in the first place.
Google no doubt optimizes their algorithms for profit, but they surely don't need to block out publishers to ensure their own sites have ads to display.
Ad inventory supply is and always will be > demand. As such, their actions to make short-term revenue by banning publishers makes sense. It's basically recycling publishers, knowing the pubs wont be able to do anything about it. Obviously it hurts their brand but they're too big to give a shit.
You might be thinking about it wrong. A site that generates $5K a month is worth way more than some Mommy blog that just started hosting ads.
I assure you, if you wrote a report that targeted your highest earning affiliates, gave them the toss, and replaced them with poor performing newbies you would lose money.
If all this just false accusation then do you care to explain why google dont have any human interaction with their adsense publishers if the account is banned or suspended while their employees go around licking the asses of people using adwords as advertisers?
I had my adsense account blocked for no reason and all the appeal went in vain without any human seeing my appeal. Now I am a major adwords advertiser for an ecommerce site and I have google representative just a call away!! thats just taking advantage of the monopoly they have created.
If all this just false accusation then do you care to explain why google dont have any human interaction with their adsense publishers if the account is banned or suspended while their employees go around licking the asses of people using adwords as advertisers?
According to the story this only started in 2009, when as far as I know they never had any human interaction with publishers, so that doesn't sound like a good sign of its veracity.
The most likely explanation is simply "because publishers don't pay them".
yes that's my point, they never have any interaction before blocking a publishers account, doesn't it look like as if google is trying to prove itself superior?
I pay for app engine, if I want human interaction then I have to pay an additional $150 a month. Google does this for services it charges for, so it is hardly surprising that it does it for ones where it is paying money.
Its not about human interaction, its about citing clear reasons and giving chance of proving innocence before suspending anyone's account and taking their money. Its impossible for a computer to understand arguments made by publisher and that's why there is need of human interaction without having to pay for it.
I don't agree with your basic assumption - google doesn't get money from publishers, but from advertisers.
If they ban one publisher, the ad may get clicked somewhere else. Let's call this metric 'ad fill factor' - how many different ads does google have for this content and traffic?
When some niche is getting near the point when there's no enough ads for its traffic the marginal value of website becomes exactly zero. At this point, banning accounts and taking their earnings makes financial sense.
I found this part interesting. So the only way to even find out the reason for your account being banned is to hire a lawyer.
> A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. The problem was that notifying the
publisher for the reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact
reason must be provided if a legal representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
It reads like some disgruntled AdSense publishers theory as to why they were banned. Now it is true that in 2009, when the Great Recession hit, Google went through its processes and identified places where controls were lax. And its true that there has always been a lot of abuse of AdSense (it is after all the first thing a neophyte ad-fraud wannabe does, which is create a page, put AdSense ads on it, and then pay a bot-net to click on them. It almost seems like some sort of starter project or tutorial it was so common)
I would be surprised though if anyone actually sought out to 'screw' the legitimate advertisers. It is after all Google's bread and butter.
The BIG Advertisers are their bread and butter, but every big advertiser knows to avoid most contextual targeting Text Ad buys.
Here's something that came into play around 2009: When a new advertiser (think small business) goes into AdWords to set up their first account, the default is to show Ads on Search AND Display Network. After setting things up, these two sources of VERY DIFFERENT traffic get lumped together in a lot of high-level reporting.
Until they specifically look at the quality of Display vs Search traffic (and see Avg Visit Durations from Display traffic around 5 seconds) they will not know about the crappy quality of sites they are on.
This is one the thing that I found curious as well.
I worked at a company who used WebTrends. Some of the their customers installed Google Analytics alongside Webtrends and then would complain that the numbers didn't match up between the two. Sometimes it wasn't close (+/- 10%) other times it was closer, but there was always a discrepancy between the two. Of course it looked since we used WebTrends, we were inflating the numbers, when in reality, it was the exact opposite.
When I read this part of the post, I could totally see them tweaking the GA numbers so they were lower.
The reason for this would be that GA filters out bot traffic differently than other vendors. That includes legitimate bots like search engine crawlers. Web analytics are just not that accurate. The number quoted by the Xoogler in an analytics manual I recently went though is an expectation of ~10%+ wiggle.
GA is always going to show 'lower' numbers than straight logs in particular because of this.
Funny; back in 2010 this exact thing happened to a company I worked at. The day before payout (for the previous month) our AdSense account was banned. So we lost 2 months worth of ad revenue. They completely ignored all of our emails and we had to move to another ad provider immediately.
that happened to me , now i dont know if there is a wide scale scam or it was just a "bug" but they banned me for no reason and of course no way to appeal.And they owed me quite a lot.I moved to some other ad service,it pays less but i still get my money.
While the money they owed me was significant
it would have been difficult(and expensive) to sue google at that time. It would be very different today.I had to write it off.And they had the audacity to send me a 50$ voucher for adsense just after that...
That is certainly a challenge. It really irks me when there is such a power imbalance and people take advantage of it. When I have to use the courts, I generally use small claims court and represent myself when I can, and I've had good luck with that, even though the time and cost for legal filings is not insignificant. The amount they owed you was likely more than the max in your state for small claims, though.
Who has the money to sue Google? Not me. Even if the court says you are right, Google has more money than most people and can simply keep litigating. For a good example of this take a look at a company called Vringo. The court has upheld that Google has willfully infringed upon their patents in their adwords system. Penalties have been set, the patent office has upheld it, etc. but Google continues to use the willfully infringing technology. They even tried a cosmetic fix to keep using it and avoid paying ongoing royalties. The court saw through that and basically said they are still willfully infringing and upped the royalty award. Google is still fighting, probably will for some time, all the while using technology that infringes on anothers patent knowingly. They are above the law. If they are going to act this way towards companies that have the assets to fight them in court, how do you think they are going to act towards the little guys who don't have millions upon millions of dollars to spend on legal teams? This info is my understanding of the case, everyone should look it up and come to their own conculusions in case I've misinterpreted what I've read.
Also happened to a company I worked at, despite years of working with them with strong revenues we were told our account was banned for illegal click activity. We asked for multiple re-reviews and each time two days later we were told it was still denied.
If this is such a slam dunk, why not just go directly to the FBI or IRS? I'm sure there are tons of people in those orgs who would LOVE to smash google if they really were behaving in such an illegal manner.
It seems a bit more realistic than hoping that they see this pastebin text, and decide to follow up on it, track you down, and get your statements on the record.
I guess the IRS isn't the right place to go because all that money is probably reported as income by Google. Too bad because IRS whistleblowers are eligible for a percentage of any amount the IRS is able to collect, and with a company as big as Google, that could be an earth-shatteringly large amount of money.
Reaching out to the authorities may take much longer or even be ignored, and causing a PR stink may be a much more effective approach. As an example, the SEC was contacted with regards to Bernard Madoff likely running a ponzy scheme as early as 1999, yet went largely ignored for a decade.
Just because you contact authorities doesn't necessarily mean they believe you or even care, regardless of how much actual evidence you have (of which the OP has presented none, by the way.) Causing a PR stink raises the profile of the issue, and could be a much more effective approach to getting the authorities attention.
That said, I don't believe OP's story for a second, for many of the same reasons other have cited. If this was a true case of whistle blowing, there would be tangible evidence but the OP has presented none.
Happened to someone I know back in 2005 I think, he lost 2 months of payment, and it was a lot of money. But he had some erotic videos on his website so... mostly his fault.
It's a fake. It's an anonymous post on pastebin, submitted by a one-time account. The terminology is wrong. The policies are wrong. The post is full of typos. The post has almost no specifics, and the one specific thing they mentioned ("AQ3C") isn't real.
If this story isn't getting traction, then HN is doing the right thing here.
The risk/reward here doesn't add up. Taking an extra few thousand a month from publishers isn't worth risking the billions in revenue they make per year.
I got banned from Google Adsense as a teenager (7 years ago). Still regret my stupid decision to try and hack Google Adsense clicks. My account was never restored :(.
Most murderers get out in a few years. Google has no sense of due process whatsoever. You should be allowed back in after a while -- especially if you were very young.
It is a beautiful peace of rhetoric. Yet I wonder, about its effectiveness/achievement inside Google in last 5 years since its inception.
Perhaps its because, don't be evil translates to, a middle ground always. Its almost like trying to keep your company on 0-loss/0-profit. That is not a great place to be, because you fall from grace easily.
I'm inclined to believe this, but I'm skeptical of Google Analytics numbers being deflated. Wouldn't people notice the data not being consistent with other tools or their own web server logs?
It's funny you mentioned this. I was researching Piwiks as an analytics tool today. In a few of the articles, they gave reason to use Piwiks because it shows more traffic than Google Analytics does, with graphs to demonstrate. These were articles from over the past few years. DDG or google search "piwiks analytics better than" and you'll likely see the same articles.
I've also seen on many SEO forums that people have complained about the same things in regards to getting banned days before their payout.
Most website advertiser types are the kind of people who are recalcitrant to file a lawsuit. I know I am myself. So really, it's a good business decision in this regard.
I can't accuse Google of anything though. On the other hand, automating account bans past a certain earning threshold unless they're high profile people seems easy to implement, with a massive earning when done on the multi-billion-dollar [0] ad revenue scale that Google oversees.
I somehow doubt this is true, but Google has done its fair share to give rise to such rumours.
Mostly they have been very opaque on the reasons of account bans, they haven't payed out the remaining balances of banned accounts (even when they presented no proof of any fraud), and finally they haven't provided a working way to appeal any bans.
I can understand their decisions, but they do come with the risk of bad PR.
As a developer, I have had, and friends have had thier Adsense accounts banned right before payout for legitimate earnings. It hurts so bad to have that happen, and Google gives you little recourse. I cannot speak to the legitimacy of this pastebin, but reading it, it sounds completely plausible. If it walks like a duck...
If you are going to sit around and "see what happens" for 3 years, you talk to a lawyer. You gather evidence. Emails, text chats, etc. You audio record meetings and conversations with people (subject to lawyer advice). You collect enough information over a long enough period of time so that an investigator can trivially search a dumped archive of email to verify your claims.
But we are supposed to believe someone who offers effectively no evidence from the duration of their claimed tenure, and who pushes it off as "I stayed because I had a family to support, and secondly I wanted to see how far they would go." and identity protection at the level of "such as waiting for the appropriate employee turn around"
So... no Hardy Boys level of investigation was performed, no evidence was gathered, no voices were recorded, no text messages were saved, no emails were forwarded, not a single byte was smuggled out on a flash drive nestled in the poster's pocket. Nothing was done to offer even the slightest bit of recording of anything.
The poster is either the most pathetic excuse for a whistle blower that I've ever heard, or it's a poor-quality April fool's joke that is 28 days too late.
There is obviously no proof one way or the other, questioning the veracity of the source does not change that. My guess is that new evidence will emerge sooner or later. A graph of cancellation dates would be an interesting start.
In cases of whistle blowing, which this is purporting to be, evidence is one of the most important things that you can gather and report on. Yet we have literally none from the OP.
What we have instead is a compelling story written anonymously, but for which there is no supporting evidence provided. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, yet there is none.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668230 brings up the most important point to this entire thread, which is that the premise under which the OP claims that Google steals money from people through cancellation falls on its face when you look at the economics of a cancellation. It's just not economically viable for Google to do that - it's like eating your leg because you're hungry. And of all the things that Google is, it's not stupid.
175 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadIt does not sound too far fetched though.
The scheme described would have leaked immediately. Too obvious and too many people.
However, considering a site making $5,000 or $10,000/month is generating quite a few clicks, I think it makes perfect sense for any account reaching these thresholds to be manually reviewed to ensure they are valid sites. The quality of Google's clicks is one of its main selling points, and by cutting out spammy sites at the source it both improves the quality of its own program and at the same time removes a lot of the financial incentive to run a scummy site.
So my guess is these policies (or similar policies that involve manual reviews of sites) make perfect sense, are not illegal in any way, and this whole posting is as bogus as it looks.
1: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en
Under this assumption banning a publisher would not diminish the revenue stream but just diverting the ads to other not yet banned publishers.
That doesn't mean the scheme as described is true, but it's not as obviously stupid as your first paragraph makes it seem.
Google no doubt optimizes their algorithms for profit, but they surely don't need to block out publishers to ensure their own sites have ads to display.
The publisher (ie your website showing ads) isn't the one paying them that money; they aren't losing any recurring revenue by banning them.
Since they're Google AdSense, it's very likely that they have plenty of new signups to show those ads on.
I assure you, if you wrote a report that targeted your highest earning affiliates, gave them the toss, and replaced them with poor performing newbies you would lose money.
According to the story this only started in 2009, when as far as I know they never had any human interaction with publishers, so that doesn't sound like a good sign of its veracity.
The most likely explanation is simply "because publishers don't pay them".
> A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. The problem was that notifying the publisher for the reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact reason must be provided if a legal representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
I would be surprised though if anyone actually sought out to 'screw' the legitimate advertisers. It is after all Google's bread and butter.
Is it? How much do Google make from the adsense publisher network vs advertising directly on Google properties?
(revenue) $3.4B network $10.5B Google properties $1.5B other
Check out that dip in '09. Interesting.
Here's something that came into play around 2009: When a new advertiser (think small business) goes into AdWords to set up their first account, the default is to show Ads on Search AND Display Network. After setting things up, these two sources of VERY DIFFERENT traffic get lumped together in a lot of high-level reporting.
Until they specifically look at the quality of Display vs Search traffic (and see Avg Visit Durations from Display traffic around 5 seconds) they will not know about the crappy quality of sites they are on.
The paragraph on G analytics is also very interesting, it never seems to line up with other tracking tools like Piwik.
I worked at a company who used WebTrends. Some of the their customers installed Google Analytics alongside Webtrends and then would complain that the numbers didn't match up between the two. Sometimes it wasn't close (+/- 10%) other times it was closer, but there was always a discrepancy between the two. Of course it looked since we used WebTrends, we were inflating the numbers, when in reality, it was the exact opposite.
When I read this part of the post, I could totally see them tweaking the GA numbers so they were lower.
GA is always going to show 'lower' numbers than straight logs in particular because of this.
It seems a bit more realistic than hoping that they see this pastebin text, and decide to follow up on it, track you down, and get your statements on the record.
Just because you contact authorities doesn't necessarily mean they believe you or even care, regardless of how much actual evidence you have (of which the OP has presented none, by the way.) Causing a PR stink raises the profile of the issue, and could be a much more effective approach to getting the authorities attention.
That said, I don't believe OP's story for a second, for many of the same reasons other have cited. If this was a true case of whistle blowing, there would be tangible evidence but the OP has presented none.
If this story isn't getting traction, then HN is doing the right thing here.
Why aren't you replying to any of them if you're acting as the voice of reason here?
Exactly because the fraudulent bans are actually a widespread phenomenon, but that goes against what Matt's been telling us here.
It is a beautiful peace of rhetoric. Yet I wonder, about its effectiveness/achievement inside Google in last 5 years since its inception.
Perhaps its because, don't be evil translates to, a middle ground always. Its almost like trying to keep your company on 0-loss/0-profit. That is not a great place to be, because you fall from grace easily.
"Be more good than evil" anyone?
I've also seen on many SEO forums that people have complained about the same things in regards to getting banned days before their payout.
Most website advertiser types are the kind of people who are recalcitrant to file a lawsuit. I know I am myself. So really, it's a good business decision in this regard.
I can't accuse Google of anything though. On the other hand, automating account bans past a certain earning threshold unless they're high profile people seems easy to implement, with a massive earning when done on the multi-billion-dollar [0] ad revenue scale that Google oversees.
[0] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/google-finally-crosses...
More earnings than not banning them and letting them continue to make money for Google?
Mostly they have been very opaque on the reasons of account bans, they haven't payed out the remaining balances of banned accounts (even when they presented no proof of any fraud), and finally they haven't provided a working way to appeal any bans.
I can understand their decisions, but they do come with the risk of bad PR.
> "...fuck the rest" (those words were actually said by a Google AdSense exec)
> there was a "sit-down" from the AdSense division higher ups to talk about new emerging issues
But we are supposed to believe someone who offers effectively no evidence from the duration of their claimed tenure, and who pushes it off as "I stayed because I had a family to support, and secondly I wanted to see how far they would go." and identity protection at the level of "such as waiting for the appropriate employee turn around"
So... no Hardy Boys level of investigation was performed, no evidence was gathered, no voices were recorded, no text messages were saved, no emails were forwarded, not a single byte was smuggled out on a flash drive nestled in the poster's pocket. Nothing was done to offer even the slightest bit of recording of anything.
The poster is either the most pathetic excuse for a whistle blower that I've ever heard, or it's a poor-quality April fool's joke that is 28 days too late.
What we have instead is a compelling story written anonymously, but for which there is no supporting evidence provided. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, yet there is none.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668230 brings up the most important point to this entire thread, which is that the premise under which the OP claims that Google steals money from people through cancellation falls on its face when you look at the economics of a cancellation. It's just not economically viable for Google to do that - it's like eating your leg because you're hungry. And of all the things that Google is, it's not stupid.