$11M settlement reached with Google regarding terminated AdSense accounts | Hacker News Reader

$11M settlement reached with Google regarding terminated AdSense accounts

adsensepublishersettlement.com

181 pointssmartician127 comments

When I was in college I had a website that I ran google ads on. I let a balance build up over time so I could use the money to buy school books. When I attempted to cash out Google (which up until that time had no problem profiting off of my site) decided that I was part of a clickfraud ring and refused to pay out the money. There was no way to appeal.

Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won't touch Google's Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don't think it's possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.

  when it comes to customer support

Do they have customer support? Last time I used my google account (a few years ago) to attempt to buy a Nexus, my transaction was flagged as fraud and I was locked out of my account.. I tried for a few days to find a way to contact anyone from Google.. never happened..

I eventually gave up and bought an iPhone and it was ironically the best thing that could have happened in that scenario.

> Do they have customer support?

if you are a big ad words spender, they have some support

They also have support for Google MyBusiness (local listing). This is their gateway to more AdWord spenders. Most noticeable because it’s the first pop up you get after you claim your listing.

Some. It's proportional to level of effort. Good luck to you if their APIs are broken and you need engineering to fix it.

Co-sponsored events (as in conferences) + AdWords 360 + Attribution 360 + high 8-digits/year spent on AdWords and another high 8 spent on YouTube isn't enough to get that sometimes.

Sure, chat support is usually fast or you can have them call you. The cheap, outsourced labor is actually very good at English.

> Do they have customer support?

Their free services have no direct support channels, as expected. I wouldn't provide free support for free services either.

I've received excellent support from Google for GSuite/Google Apps and Google Cloud over the years, both via chat and calls, usually out of their Ireland office.

I live in Fiji and my account with them isn't worth all that much (~$100/month).

> Their free services have no direct support channels, as expected

Why is this "as expected"? Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon all have direct support channels for free tier customers. They aren't as prompt, but it's only Google who doesn't have these things at all.

Do they?

* I don't believe Microsoft offers support for their free products to people who haven't bought an O365 licence, and instead you have to use their god-awful Microsoft Answers forum (they seem to change this up every few years though so this might not currently be the case). It's community support so if you're having an issue with your account this won't help you, but if you're confused about how to use a product Microsoft makes you might get a response.

* Apple doesn't have any free products (even if you have only downloaded free apps and listen to free audiobooks, you have to run it on hardware you purchased from them).

* Similarly, Amazon requires you to pay in one way or another (Buying an item, paying for prime to watch prime video, etc) to use any of their services. AFAIK AWS doesn't have free support.

* Facebook has a "help center" that's marginally more useful than Microsoft's, but it has the same problem... it's all community support so nobody can "pull up" your account to fix any real issues (like being locked out).

Apple makes some software available for other platforms without charge, such as Safari for Windows.

Do they offer support for it? I am really asking, I have no idea. I would assume they don't

I have no clue. I don’t know what support people would think they need for a browser, but computer illiterate people expect some crazy things.

> I don't believe Microsoft offers support for their free products to people who haven't bought an O365 licence

Over a year ago I had a couple of polite email exchanges with MS support about a family member's free OneDrive account, using the email address they put front and center.

(They were courteous but did not budge on MS unilaterally curtailing the 15 GB offer used to sell phones to consumers a few months prior.)

I thought that Google took a cut from every AdWords transaction - in which case the service is definitely not free. Is this not the case?

Edit: applies even if you're referring to the Nexus purchase.

  I wouldn't provide free support for free services either.

I was trying to purchase a $600 phone..

> Do they have customer support?

Two effective strategies I have seen are:

(1) Contact a friend who works at Google and show them the comical chain of correspondence showing how your simple, silly problem got even sillier over time. Convince your friend or friends to show an interest in the problem internally.

(2) Write a blog post about the problem and circulate it on social media (news.ycombinator and /r/programming front pages seem to work great).

Exactly the same here, I was looking forward to the day I could finally cash out and use it for stuff I needed (also a cash-stripped kid at the time), and then they decided I had committed fraud.

Nowadays I’m trying to avoid using any hosted services at all due to that (and later, similar) experiences.

are you talking about the $100 threshold?

It was a 70€ threshold over here, but yes.

I was waiting to cash out, and just days before I got a "oops it was fraud", and they decided to keep it all.

It was my first negative experience with Google, and definitely not the last.

I was always extremely scared of that happening to my account. I was making fairly good money, but it was hard to trust it with all of the random shutdown stories I read about. I tried several alternatives, but none paid anywhere near as much. They effectively had a monopoly on the online advertising market.

For lack of another comparison it reminds me of dirty cops pulling over a suspected criminal or known criminal and acting like they are doing the person a favor by taking all of their drugs, money, and loose possessions. It's a fucked up and weird world we are living in. Gotta protect what you can how you can.

Go to your local police station and file a report for criminal fraud? If the police/DA/whoever just ignores it, or measurably doesn't care what comes out of it, you should be able to start legal action against them for what basically boils down to 'too incompetent for this job', which by the way is even possible for judges, but the bar for it is high, and won't be hit unless the judge was careless in his misbehavior.

Over 70€? You're better off working for a day at a minimum wage job. I'm not saying this is fair but the amount of work involved to (successfully) bring charges against someone who isn't following up on a claim you made would be way greater.

I see it as a matter of principle. Yes, you are likely richer personally if you just ignore it.

This happened to me as well, virtually the same story.

I had something similar happen. I still remember the cancellation notice. It was like, "don't bother contacting us; this decision is final." No way to see why they thought my adsense account was a risk. No evidence. Just, "thanks for the referrals, now GTFO"

No way for me to even try to prove that it wasn't me doing anything.

I had been spending a bit of money on AdWords for my law office website at the same time. Stopped that right away. It was my futile and meaningless attempt at retribution, of course. :)

Makes your blood boil, doesn't it? The injustice just in this thread makes me gnash my teeth :-)

> It was my futile and meaningless attempt at retribution, of course. :)

Don't say that! Each journey starts with a single step, as frustrating and futile as it may seem. And as this thread shows, many are already marching in the same direction. When enough frozen raindrops merge, even mountains move.

Anecdata: My customer experience with Google has been "OK" (a small paid G Suite account). I have no expectation of free support for their free services.

The truth is no one knows how much Google has stolen from customers under such excuses.

That's a very interesting perspective.

Are you me? Same story, except that it's my users uploading questionable (not explicit) images, and I quickly restricted where the ad would show. Then suddenly I am committing fraud and bye bye account.

Up to this day, I pretty much avoid all Google services except a forwarding Gmail account, Youtube, and some searches. I also continuously recommended anyone who asked my advice to avoid Google (even more than Facebook.) I've been doing this for the last 10 years already.

Good riddance Google. Your Ad-Sense support was quite frankly, customer unsupport.

That's eerie, the same thing happened to me.

I had the same experience, also as a college student with my personal site. I pretty much stopped using most Google services after that point (adsense, webmaster, even search thanks to ddg).

It took me months to slowly watch it rise up to the $100 threshold and I was thrilled to get my first ever ad revenue check, small as it might be. Only to have it taken away after I had given them my personal information.

Free ad space for Google, accusations of having a click ring for me (would have been a pretty pathetic ring if was anyway).

/vent

This one still stings, even though it was years ago. I built and ran a mobile sports news application, we amassed millions of users and were written up in several publications.

One day our AdSense account was disabled, no warning, no nothing. We had never resorted to a single 'trick' or 'hack'. Nobody at Google could even tell us what exactly we were supposedly accused of.

After months of escalation, the final word was "we cannot tell you what you have allegedly done, we will not re-instate your account, you may not appeal any further".

Did you involve legal council?

You need at least a coven or cabal to take on Google, council isn't going to cut it.

Well whoever filed this lawsuit seems to have succeeded.

Plaintiffs were represented by Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Limited Liability Presidium.

> ... a Limited Liability Presidium.

Shouldn't that have been Limited Liability Partnership? Autocomplete fail?

No.

I was once banned from a large company's (not Google's) ad program for alleged click fraud and was told there was no appeal process and that they would not be providing additional information. After demanding proof, I was told that they would not provide it due to trade secrets.

However, I didn't give up. I was eventually able to convince them to give me proof by being extremely annoying and repeatedly e-mailing the CEO and others in the company until they relented.

The "proof" they had was one of the most ridiculous misunderstandings of how the web works that I've ever seen; it's as if their click fraud department was run by someone who had no computer skills beyond using Excel. I wrote a comprehensive document explaining what happened in the scenario they saw, why it happened, how to prevent it, and admonished them for stonewalling me on something that was so clearly not my fault and not an instance of click fraud.

As a result, they reinstated me and paid my earnings, but I feel terrible for what I'm sure were hundreds of other people who were wrongly terminated and weren't able to get a response from them like I did.

Can you go into more detail about the proof or technique they thought you were using?

This was years ago for me, but as bad as it is losing the amount earned, it was just the lack of response when trying to understand why you were terminated. I had no idea why I was banned. I didn't employ any shady tricks. The only thing I noticed in the few weeks prior to the account banned was a higher CTR.

I actually emailed Adsense support at that time to let them know that it was out of the ordinary for my site.

Additionally, I also had an account on the CPA affiliate side of things with the same account that was banned because it was tied with the Adsense email account.

Same for me here. The lack of response was ridiculous. I would have loved to been told what was wrong or why the ban so I could at least try to resolve the issue somehow. But the only thing I received in return was that the decision was final. I noticed a higher CTR prior to the ban, but nothing else out of the ordinary.

I had Webmaster tools and Analytics on site, so after the ban I could still research backwards, and could not find anything that was out of the ordinary other than the CTR was just a bit higher.

Eh, it seems this is still a bit of a sore subject for me. I lost a good bit of income from this decision, and it hurt at the time. Looking back, I'm glad I don't gain income from this any longer. It just seems like a scam. I started out using my websites as a place to teach and inform and the different subjects I have knowledge and interests in. But trying to blend keywords in so that Google and the other ads I ran could get high quality "eyeballs" on my content really became an inauthentic experience.

Same here. They won't do anything about a wrongful ban unless you're someone making decent money.

I'm glad I don't gain/depend on income from adsense any longer as well. Moved on to CPA and then SaaS.

I get the "We think your business is a scam and so we are terminating our relationship" but I don't understand why "... and we'll keep the money." doesn't result in criminal charges.

Because the publisher agreed to that when they started the relationship?

You can sign your rights to class action lawsuits away, too, but I still find it wrong.

What's even worse is that they won't tell you what you allegedly did wrong. You can appeal, but you have to guess what you did wrong and provide evidence, but you can't even access your click data anymore since you're now locked out. It's like being in a relationship with a psychotic person.

Exactly and that's one of not-so-many reasons I'm so happy for GDPR to kick in!

Basically a big fuck you to Google: "give me all the data you have on me or I will report you and you may be on the hook for 4% of your revenue".

google.com/takeout

The reason you've been down voted is that takeout gives you all YOUR data that they hold, not THEIR data about you (which GDRP now says is mostly now your data)

Whats even crazier is that I used that tool and google took 4 hours to build my archives. Fair enough. Problem is... some files are not mine!!! clearly not my name not my email address not my correspondence. No idea how this is happening. I will reach out to this person but other than that no idea where to reach to google as their checkout page does not offer any "contact us". I am also concerned someone using this tool will get my own data!!!

All ad networks take money away from publishers all of the time. For example, it takes a while to compute the quality score of ad clicks and realize that a site's traffic is full of bots that click on ads and never buy anything. The publisher will see income that gets subtracted back out, sometimes a month or two later. The advertiser (presumably) gets a refund.

It appears that Google did something different this time, I don't know what.

Maybe they didn't return the money back to customers.

That's a given.

On the advertiser side of Google's services, I have a refund for "invalid activity" on almost every monthly statement going back nearly a decade.

> You received a credit because we found invalid activity on your ads. What is it: Invalid activity refers to clicks and impressions that we suspect aren't the result of genuine customer interest. We don't charge you for invalid activity on your ads. Example: Invalid activity includes clicks and impressions performed by automated tools, as well as accidental clicks – for instance, if someone double clicks your ad.

Sure, but you'll never be in a position to audit that data. No independent 3rd party verification would ever do for Google ads.

one possibility is the refund is done to create the illusion click fraud is being prevented . It's like a manager telling the owner only $100 was taken from the til but $150 was and he pockets the $50. Not that I'm saying google is like that but you have no way of auditing this figure.

I get your point but in your example the scam would be:

'It's like a manager telling the owner only $150 was taken from the til but $100 was and he pockets the $50. Not that I'm saying google is like that but you have no way of auditing this figure.'

But, in googles case it's more like: We charge you 1,000$ they say 100$ was fraud and refund you 100$ meanwhile 200$ was and they keep the 30% of 100$ distributing 70$ back for fraudulent clicks they don't really investigate.

Interesting, I've seen people advice each other to support apps they can't buy by tapping on ads - were they actually harming devs?

Yes.

And if your webpage says something like "please click on the ads to support my website", you'll get a warning from Google. Presumably they also look for suggestions like that within apps.

Coinhive works that way as well. I believe it is justified to call both a scam by themselves. Why? Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (innocent until proven guilty).

The problem lies with our justice system though. If it were more efficient we'd have less things like self-censorship and self-moderation.

> Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (innocent until proven guilty).

Seriously?

...yes?

"[The burden of] proof lies on him who states [a claim], not who denies [it]."

I think it's about the use of Latin for a phrase with a common English version.

With a verbatim translation. How apropos.

Don't you mean "How apropos (appropriate)"? Or (on the nose) maybe.

He just doesn't grok it does he?

I worked in advertising and I saw how scared AdSense publishers constantly were of getting banned by Google. I understand that Google has to defend their business, but some times they were really harsh on things that were debatable grey areas. I always thought that Google was just needlessly giving itself a bad reputation as a business partner.

$11M is about 1 hr of Google's revenue (365 x 24 x 11/100000 = 0.96)

EDIT: This actually reminded me of that post a few days ago on HN, about the guy comparing foxes and racoons with some companies in the financial industry, and how some could be winning at the game but losing at the meta-game. Google should be more careful with its meta-game.

11 million is a joke really. I only lost about $250, but it pretty much killed off an otherwise promising potential startup.

Alternative reading: they did you a favor by showing you early on that they could kill your startup at a moments notice. That's a lot better than to have 25 people on the payroll and see your advertising contract go up in smoke (which happened to me).

I agree. It also taught me a valuable (and fairly cheap) lesson on not relying on a single source of revenue.

yeah if someone slips on your property and gets hurt, you're looking at millions potentially

But a $600+ billion dollar company that steals millions of dollars from thousands of publishers? $11 million . It's as if they measured it down to the penny exactly which is rare because often you see these huge settlement numbers like for tobacco companies, where it seems excessive. But the case where there are the most victims and the most hurt victims and victims that are the most innocent gets the most pathetic, most measured payout. It's the exact opposite of the frivolous lawsuit.

Hi, could you reference me to your edit article? Would love to read it!

http://epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/

I've had friends that have lost $100k+ due to Adsense terminations on legitimate sites. I've personally lost about $10k. We'll see how much I actually get paid out from this class action (I think I read that they cap it at $5k)

Yes: "... Payments to each of the Class Representatives, not to exceed $5,000 each, as compensation for their active participation in the case on behalf of the Settlement Class ..."

EDIT: see below for correction

As your quote notes, Class Representatives mean people with "active participation in the case" - i.e. the members of the class who spend their time dealing with the class lawyers and showing up in court as named plaintiffs.

This would be separate from anything that class members receive just by being class members.

Good catch! From the agreement document: "“Class Representative(s)” means each and all of the named Plaintiffs in this Action: Free Range Content, Inc., Coconut Island Software, Inc., Taylor Chose, and Matthew Simpson"

So that clause means that the plaintiffs will get up to $5,000 on top of what they will receive as claimants, and there is no such limit on claims (but the total payments will not exceed 11 million, including attorney and class representative compensation).

Great to know! Here's to hoping they pay out the entire amount I'm owed.

Thanks, Guys!

If I were you, I would expect to receive literally pennies on the dollar.

Attorney fees will eat up a significant chunk of that $11MM.

Some publishers lost over $1 million I think. After the fees and lawyer cut, I don't think much will be left. The $11 million is a reduced figure. The initial figure probably was enough to cover all payouts and fees.

Years ago I tried to start a small side business on Youtube. I filmed and edited a dozen or so videos with great effort, and hid them until we could launch. While we were polishing things one of the guys that was working with me clicked on an ad, I believe twice. It was for a car or something and it was worth about $12 total. I almost immediately saw it on our account, and figured out what happened. I tried to disown those clicks and that revenue, but there was no way to do it and there was nothing I could do. It was obviously not a genuine users click because no one was watching our videos yet, and I'm sure the guy's account was associated to our project.

Sure enough, a few weeks later we were perma-banned from adsense. Destroyed all hope for my business. At no point did we get to communicate with a live person. Fortunately I had set up an LLC and used the Federal Tax ID from the company instead of my own SSN or I would have basically been blackballed from internet advertising forever. I disputed it, owning up to what happened and explaining how I couldn't undo it. The robo-response was that my dispute had been rejected, ban was permanent.

I bet this destroyed so many people's hopes and hard work over the years. When you have a million followers, it will take serious fraud to cause a problem. When you are a nobody starting out, figuring things out for the first time, you make one mistake and you are done forever. I realized that if anyone didn't like a less popular uploader they could just make a new account, and click on their ads until they got banned. Pretty horrible.

I haven't been involved with adsense since, but if they don't provide the ability to disown clicks they should add that. There is a lot of testing that goes on when you are building a product.

Seems most people here had the same experience. I do not understand why their practices are not actually illegal. We sent them tons of traffic (aka money to them) and they just terminated without any explanation or recourse. 11M sounds very low; we had a small company and we already lost several $100k.

Frankly, the amount of power Google holds over small businesses is terrifying. It's incredible that a small bug in one of Google's algorithms could destroy your main source of income, with no explanation or recourse.

I had a 12-months old AdSense account with 300 GBP to withdraw. After I tried to cash out, Google banned the account for click fraud. If they were able to detect it, why didnt didn’t they do it on-the-fly and show my actual balance? This happened 10 years ago. Since then I was pretty sure Google is running a massive scam on the long-tail small publishers. Glad to know at least in US they lost a case...

Almost everyone involved in content creation and tech has a story about being kicked from Google Adsense.

What sucked about Google Adsense doing this is everyone started using Google, then got big and they killed off smaller web ad networks. Then they ripped the rug from under content creators that chose them where they cut them off.

It was a bad move, I sometimes think it was a big data move only to get people's personal information and get free tracking across the web of user activity.

It was definitely evil and the brick wall they setup for clarification was unnecessary and very cold.

Back in the early 2000s I ran Google ads, back when they were only text and small boxes. You had to earn $100 to get a payout I think, and after forever I still had like $12. I forgot about it and eventually pulled the ads. In 2011 I sold the domain to some Irish company that gave me $10k USD for it. ... kinda regret it now.

It looks like I have the same Google account (found the old e-mails for adsense on that domain) even though I have nothing listed under adsense right now.

I no longer run ads on any of my sites and probably never will, but it would be nice to get that fucking $12 for letting Google run all those text ads for those years.

Eventually Google will mark your adsense account as abandoned and transfer the money to the state where you can claim it. I'm a few months away before I can claim the $50 I have from adsense.

My first respsonce was, that's it? Even personal injury lawsuits get bigger verdicts than that, and this involves actual businesses and thousands of people. The lawyers and other fees will eat much of that. No wonder google does not have to worry and can act with impunity .

I had an adsense account to profit from an IP address i randomly purchased from an ISP, which was formerly apparently a somewhat popular porn site. Racked up about $950 in a month, then they turned me off, something about violating terms etc etc.

It was a glorified 404 page with a google search widget & adsense ads on it.

Putting Adsense ads on pages without content is an obvious violation of the ToS.

11 million distributed around is going to be close to nothing on a per-publisher basis. I wouldn't be surprised if the spread was more than 100 to 1 on owed vs collected. (so if you lost 100k from a terminated adsense account, I doubt you would even get 1k from this settlement)

Google ads where for the little guys, those small blogs, and personal web pages, with only a few thousands visitors/months. And you earned just as much as the big guys per user. Now it's only for the big guys, good luck earning anything if you have less then 10,000 monthly visitors. And it's the same for advertisers, good luck getting any clicks on your ads (99% of clicks are bots) if your budget is less then $10,000. When more and more people start to use ad blockers, there will only be bots left. There's more money then ever in advertising. But you need to be big in order to see any of it. I guess Google have tried to fight the bots, but it's an impossible battle with too many false positives, and small guys losing their hard earned ad money. I guess Google is too big to notice, they are one of the big guys, and they always get their share. I hope they go back to non intrusive text ads, show some love for the small guys, and kill the bot. Maybe add "captcha" to ads after you click them !? They need to do something drastic or their whole ad based business might crumble from beneath.

When ever I read stories about adsense providers behaving like this, or even "banks" like paypal just closing accounts without any legal security whatsoever, or Websites themself selling user data and serving malware, I always think of situation Warez sites and their users were in a decade ago.

Sure, If you visited specific Warez sites, you could assume that the Ads served will likely infect your machine. And sure, the guys running the websites might not be able to cash out the ad revenue.

But the realization, that a lot of legit businesses today are in the same situation as sites who were run from shady servers in "digital no mans land" by guys concerned that some kind of law enforcement might ask who owns the site is either funny or deeply disturbing.

So many stories of people who had their account terminated.

I wonder why they just wouldn't go to a small cases court.

> Payments to each of the Class Representatives, not to exceed $5,000 each, as compensation for their active participation in the case on behalf of the Settlement Class;

$11M payout for possibly thousands of publishers is pennies.

Class actions provide an opt out for class members which allows them to retain their own right to sue for that reason. Of course, if you lost money and weren't willing to take the cost/risk of a direct action suit to try to recover it before, I don't know why you'd spit in the face of someone successfully for securing you a mechanism for some.(if small) recovery now for basically zero cost now.

Amazon stole about 2k from me in an affiliate account, rejected appeals. Someone should file a class action against them too, not worth it for me to do it alone.

A google search for " Free Range Content, " shows nothing. They probably went out of business due to being banned.

Is the notice pdf text near-unreadable for anyone else or is it just pdf.js being messy? http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/notice.pdf

Reads fine for me in Safari.

What the title has to do with the page? I could not find this $11M anything on that page!

>What the title has to do with the page? I could not find this $11M anything on that page!

It is on page #9 of the settlement PDF: http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/settlement.pd...

"1.44. “Settlement Fund” means a cash fund of $11,000,000, to be paid by Google in accordance with the terms of this Settlement Agreement. "

and later on the same page:

"2.1. Settlement Fund. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Google shall establish a Settlement Fund of $11,000,000. Google’s total financial commitment under this Agreement shall be $11,000,000. "

Later there is the order in which this amount will be paid, the actual people which suffered from the thing will be paid last (only after deduction of expenses, services, etc. which it is easy to presume will not be "peanuts").

We'll see how much people that were affected will actually get back.

OP should have linked the PDF instead.

He was not the poster of this article.

Oh sorry. Corrected the comment.

$11 million seems astonishingly small given the number of people that have been screwed by Adsense. If myself and one other friend received full payment for our closed accounts, we would consume about 2% of this fund by ourselves.

Have you not considered suing them yourselves?

We have, but it would likely cost more than we are owed, and take years. We might also get attorneys fees, but that wouldn't be guaranteed, so it's kind of a "win the battle/lose the war" type of proposition.

Why just 2010 to 2018? Mine was terminated back in 2008 with about $500 in it.

Mine was terminated before that, and to this day I can't open an adsense account, even with a site that gets a million views per year.

file an LLC and get an EIN

The LLC will be banned along with all it's employees. Google bans related accounts of banned accounts as it's considered ban evasion

Seems like Amazon is learning from Google here... Or did they form a cartel on freezing accounts without any explanation or recourse?

Ugh, yeah this brings back bad memories. Similar to and reminds me of all the PayPal issues in the past as well. What headaches.

Does the settlement also apply to admob? They terminated admob accounts as well.

Sweet. Can we get one for all the Amazon Affiliate accounts as well?

This is quite a one-sided 'settlement'. I suppose $11M will be enough to pay the 'administrative costs'. What a joke, 'Hon. Beth Labson Freeman'. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

That'll show em. I wonder if Google even had to move money from anywhere, or if it was fine to pay with profits from part of the day.

This is a rounding error to Google, they could not care less.

I think (?) op was being sarcastic.

Probably just had to demonetize a few more Youtubers in the name of censorship.

Does this also apply to admob?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com