Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
Lots of people have been banned by AdSense, and for obvious reasons the most vocal are the people who were a few days from payout. Lets try and figure out if there really is a pattern here. If you had an account banned please answer when in the payout cycle it happened to you.
167 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadIn the end, it's would be a civil legal matter and probably not worth anybody's time for $100 coupled with the high chance of losing considering the terms of service agreed to.
Google has to do it's best to serve it's customers on both sides, those who display ads and those who pay for advertisers. Cheating exists, the mechanisms to mitigate that cheating aren't perfect, and each side loses some as a result. To claim that their imperfect anti-cheating mechanism is fraudulent is quite a stretch, and you'll be hard pressed to find a advertising facilitator which provides better customer service for such small sums of money.
Side 1: advertisers, budget: millions
Side 2: small content providers, revenue: hundreds
There's no way that's balanced.
So yeah, what I probably should have said is, "It smells of fraud, plain and simple". I am open to hearing Google's side of the story.
Without reading the contract it's impossible to say whether or not the reported conduct is in conformance with it, but if I had to bet, I'd bet it is.
Has anyone ever seen that their AdWords or any other Google-related ads spending got partially refunded?
I wonder how's this feasible given the delay between the ad spending and account asset freeze. This can take years if the freeze validation occurs close to an actual payout.
Is Google sending the amount back to my adwords-associated credit card or does it go as a budget for future ads?
I find it hard to understand how this kind of refunding works full scale to make sure all the account freezes will distribute the spending back to the advertisers.
In the long term, Google would be happy to replace the open web with Android or Google+. In the short term if you compete with Google images or other Google properties it is open season.
Ideally this would cause a delay in the payout, but if an account doesn't break the threshold until just before the payment date, the review might cause a delay.
This is common on ad platforms, credit card processors and even auction platforms like eBay. I would guess that it's a "standard practice" for risk mitigation.
Any site that attracts a large number of fraudulent clicks is going to get their AdSense account banned. The site owner has no recourse if this happens to them: they agreed to it when they signed up in the first place - Google can drop them for whatever reason they feel like at any time.
Is it really that easy to put a gun to any random adsense user's head?
If you're lucky, you catch it, report it to Google & they just take the income away (as it should be). If you're unlucky, Google decides that you're trying to defraud them & their ad clients and kills your entire AdSense account for all the sites you have registered with them. A scorched earth policy being the best possible policy apparently.
If you get on the tor network, you should be able to find a few places where you can pay (for example) a $100 for 30,000 views/clicks from a random country in the world to hit a site.
I'd imagine 30,000 false adsense clicks would do it.
Once you receive a warning notice, your site enters the scopes of the policy enforcement team. When you make changes to your AdSense code, possibly other relevant code on your site, they send human reviewers to reevaluate your site.
I believe this because I received a warning for encouraging unintentional clicks.
I received this warning because in-content ad units had links blended to site link colors.
Additionally, I was aligning ad units with images.
After making these changes, the issue was resolved.
They never ceased serving ads, which was nice.
This occurred around the 7-8k monthly mark for those wondering.
After making these changes my revenue dropped about 1/4. This was disappointing.
A few weeks later I tried to revert to the in-content ad units with the blended link colors. I tried to use a light gray background color, literally one shade away from white, to distinguish the ad unit from content.
Within 30 minutes of making these changes, I received two new warnings,
one for encouraging unintentional clicks, and another for having content over ads.
This is because I had a hover drop down menu for navigation that dropped over ads in some parts.
I made the changes and ad serving has continued.
I make less now, but as someone who depends on AdSense income to provide for my family, I am happy to continue serving ads in the first place.
The reason there is no competition is because everybody else is scared shitless to open themselves up to publishers.
Click fraud is a thriving and sophisticated business, and nobody else (major) has had the chops to explore that black box.
I found my experience with AdSense enforcement to be fair, but the process is frightening.
I am excited that Facebook is experimenting with their ad network.
Competition is good for everybody.
One important issue that is also missing from this discussion is how Google refunds advertisers. I know I have heard from advertisers who got money back from click fraud.
A shame, but something I should have anticipated.
By submitting an application to use the Services, if you are an individual, you represent that you are at least 18 years of age.
If you are 18 now I would try again. That they ignore requests from underage people is understandable, when their terms of service state that they are not allowed to join.
Did you not know this or did no one ever notify you of this? It seems that this phenomena does play a role in the online debate. People will say they've been banned and that they have no clue as to why, and that Google gave no reason or ignores their plight. Perhaps some of them did not read the terms of service too?
I see the same cognitive dissonance on SEO forums. People are most vocal when their site got hit with a manual penalty ("for no reason"). They'll ask why their SEO does not work as well, and then you see their sites and everything seems to violate a Webmaster Guideline.
It is not too nice to lose your payout days before you'll receive it. But it is also not too nice to steal money from Google and its advertisers with click fraud. I do not think that Google ONLY bans the fraudsters, never making any mistakes. But I also find it hard to believe that more than 50% of banned users are innocent. This tactic of killing accounts days before payout is to discourage the fraudsters and TOS-breakers, and I still think that is the majority of bans.
As for the reason why I was banned, I'm confident that one of my competitors was clicking my ads intentionally to get me banned.
I would not be surprised if yesterday's "leak" is indeed true.
Edit: I should add that I had been using Adsense since ~2006, when I was first banned. No big changes had been made to my website (one at the time), in the time before the ban. I never got an explanation other than the standard "illegal activity" message everyone seem to get.
Perhaps a more productive activity would be to post the reasons Google cited for ceasing the ad serving on your site and then explain what you changed.
Linking to your site would also be helpful.
In this way we can determine more reasonably whether they were right in suspending your account.
Surely it is not the number of accounts that were banned that is important but rather the reasons why they are banning them and the fairness of the review process.
I don't think Google is necessarily doing this on purpose, but I do think, as with most Google products, they don't utilize their resources properly to gather feedback from the publishers to identify exactly where the problems are and what is occurring in order to properly resolve them. Instead they see a fire internally and attempt to put it out which just pushes the problem to another area. Adwords, and in turn Adsense, are the bread and butter for Google earnings, and while I understand it is nearly impossible to handle every publisher issue they must receive, Google has a bad reputation when it comes to dealing with any problem at all. I do know that when your Adsense account reaches I believe $100 a week (not positive on the exact amount but that is what it was at one time) in earnings you do get direct email access to their support team, but even this is not enough in most cases.
It doesn't take long to do a quick Google search to see that these issues are not isolated to one or two users. It is a systematic problem that has been occurring for several years now. Some larger publishers have even identified specific IP addresses for click bots and reported them to Google, yet Google does nothing to ban these IP addresses causing more users to experience the problem.
When this happens, usually I get warning from adsense asking me to remove the objectionable content with in 48 hours. Sometimes, they block adsense on my website and email me about it. I promptly removed the content and reverted back. Adsense was restored on my website after a few days.
I get disabled, Google lets me know, I fix the issue, appeal, and get Adsense restored. My forums have Adsense incomes that range from $100/mo to $1800/mo.
Google has been great so far. It does feel precarious to have all my eggs in the Adsense basket, but the payout from other ad networks is abysmal in comparison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
Including Matt Cutts' response to the text in the pastebin:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7669071
Asking the ad department if they've been stealing money from thousands of publishers over the last several years? Of course they're going to deny, no matter the truth as confirming would essentially be an admission a very serious crime.
confirming would essentially be an admission a very serious crime.
Serious crime? It is actually a problem (there needs to be more competition in this space), but Google can tell any publisher to stuff it at any time. They don't need to have a reason. Now generally that doesn't make sense if they're making money on the relationship, but we know that in many cases they aren't -- that a lot of shady sites undermine the trust advertisers have in the platform.
A lot of people engage in click fraud. A lot of people completely break the advertising agreements (the ads that try to solicit accidental clicks, the apps and sites that implore you to click on ads to help support them, etc). These might seem fine in isolation -- Google makes lots of money and little guy just wants a bit of chump change -- but if it isn't controlled it seriously threatens the entire advertising model. One of the reasons Google has succeeded in a cutthroat industry is that they take measures to prevent and control this.
The people caught out will always claim innocence.
Google needs publishers. They aren't going to cut off their nose for a short-term gain. But for those scam sites and users, it is better to be rid of them.
For the sake of argument, I'll take a contrary position (I agree that the post smells like it belongs on snopes.com).
They haven't faced a risk of losing publishers yet. There are plenty of them. IF publishers called BS on Google and quit playing Adsense with them, then they may be forced to take care of the publishers they have. But as it stands, they can very well get away with using publishers until it's time to pay up, then dismissing them without explanation.
I faced this kind of stuff from them as an advertiser. One of my apps throws a red flag every time I advertise it- then I have to wait for human intervention to review, and always without explanation of what I need to fix.
This went on for years- I modify an ad, the ad is banned until review. Every time the ad was allowed, after review, because I am not doing anything immoral.
I implored them to give me the benefit of the doubt, after all these years, and spot-check if they need to. Hell, my grocery story lets me check out my own groceries with only occasional 'audits.'
But not Google. Not even after years.
Is there any reason why 4x more people would be banned within four days of a payout than any other part of the cycle?
(This presupposes the poll results can be trusted, which seems dubious at best. But if this survey is trustworthy, then I wonder what it implies.)
So either 2% of all HN readers have had their AdSense account banned, or the poll results are a bit noisy :)
(Obviously this is extremely rough math, but allowing for a huge error margin, 0.5% of HN readers would still seem too high, at least to me)
On saying that, AdSense is an enormous program
Actually, HN has grown exponentially since 2011. You'll have to extrapolate this chart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253773
Also, the traffic fluctuates depending on which part of the day you measure. There are comparatively few people here during 3AM - 7AM in the US.
I think it's also worth noting that it can be trivial to get an account banned if you just get a few people to keep clicking the same ads all day. So 'legitimate' bans could happen even when there was no foul play from the person showing the ads.
Now, as to whether or not their check is valid - that's the real question.
AdWords and AdSense policies tell advertisers and publishers that advertiser spending on evicted publishers are refunded for the preceding 60 days. Because this policy has to do with revenue recognition, it's presumably under SOX control, so it would be difficult and very risky to willfully violate it.
So Google faces a larger cash loss if they cancel a publisher just after a payout than if they do so before. And they have no incentive to cancel publishers just to keep the money: they refund the advertisers, so they lose not only their share of the advertising spend, but they have to pay the publisher share of any unrecoverable previous payout out of their own pockets.
Disclosure: I used to work for Google.
I don't understand how 3 weeks before payout is not enough time to analyze the previous month's clicks/impressions for fraud.
Edit: To further clarify, we were expecting to receive a payment in the low five figures. Also, during that month I was invited to a special Google event where I spoke one on one with AdSense employees on how to optimize the site for revenue. Then two weeks later I received notice of our account suspension.
Going through the usual appeal process just returned automated messages, which also ended up in a dead end. So eventually we just moved on.
Funny enough, I was able to dig up an old blog post by the AdSense team with my photo: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/09/continuing-adsense-in-yo.... There's me holding up a big chalkboard, two weeks before getting banned off their platform. That was years ago, so I've since moved on but it was a good lesson learned.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...
I submitted a claim and they said: sorry, no - you're done.
There was zero reason to do it. No ToS violations, no fraudulent clicks. Just $30k less in my bank account for the next year. The second most frustrating part, aside from the loss of revenue, is that they won't tell you why or what caused the cancellation.
Edit 2: RIP AdSense account, ~2006-2012
At the time I didn't fight it, just said "OK, I'll just switch providers, please close my account." Google did actually pay me the rest of the money in my account.
But, since then, I've been disallowed from using AdSense on any new sites, Flash games or not, and, weirdly, been banned from Google Code too, so if I want to use a project on there I have to log out first.
I've since stopped using Google services, even learned about postfix & dovecot so I could host my own email. Never looked back.
Shame about the lack of viable alternatives to AdSense, though. I did use AdBrite for a while, though their ads were sleazy sometimes. Now they're gone.