Hacker News Reader

  The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated
  his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the
  fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be
  just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely
  scraping by.

That's unnecessarily harsh. The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind: by endorsing the ads that were being displayed, he would get more money, but they would get more, serious, traffic. Suppose he had a private contract with an advertiser. Then that advertiser would applaud him saying 'please visit companyX: they sell stuff you may very well want to buy from them and they support this site'. There is no reason to suppose the intention was different in this case.

It seems you can display Google's ads, but should never comment on them in any way, not even to say 'Gosh, I really like how they so accurately list companyA, companyB and companyC as relevant for my site.' The first rule of using AdSense is, you don't talk about AdSense?

It might seem that way to you but it's not true. You can talk about AdSense all you want, as you and many others did commenting on this story.

What you cannot do, for obvious reasons, is to entice people to click on ads. It doesn't matter how subtle the encouragement is, how good are your intentions, how many kids you still have to support, how many kittens you saved from certain death. It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement and violating that agreement gets you banned from AdSense.

I'm also making money from AdSense and the simple reality is that if Google doesn't take steps to limit the kind of click fraud that this guy openly, if very verbosely, admits to, it'll hurt everyone else who's not matching it and in the long term will hurt everyone, period, because there will be less money in the ecosystem if ad publishers feel ripped off.

  It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think
  about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement

Laws are also both obvious and spelled clearly. Nevertheless we need judges to interpret them according to each situation. Even with those judges in place, we still accept that some people will be punished for moral behavior, while others will walk free for immoral behavior, because a law cannot possibly cover every situation under which it will apply.

In this case, it seems to be the regrettable situation where someone is being punished for moral behavior. Regrettable, but perhaps unavoidable. However, that's as far as you should be willing to go. Trying to justify Google's actions by accusing the one that was punished of immoral behavior is not necessary and not warranted.

it seems to be the regrettable situation where someone is being punished for moral behavior

Someone is being held accountable for a contract they willingly entered. The morality of the behavior is not at issue - moral or not they legally agreed not to do it. The rest, IMO, is hand waving.

I agree with you, but I think your appeals to 'the obvious' and 'the simple reality' are weak.

  The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind

That may be what he has in mind, but experience shows that isn't what happens. Instead you get a situation where people with no interest whatsoever in purchasing anything click the link just to help out the website they are interested in. Just because the traffic comes from the targeted demographic doesn't mean it's actually serious.

I'm not saying that Google did an excellent job of handling this situation. It amazes me that they think it's appropriate to revoke thousands of dollars in earnings without (usually) providing someone to talk to. That said, asking people to click links on your site is bound to invite well-meaning individuals to click on ads they have no intent of following, which is practically the definition of click-fraud.

Important to note - Google revoked their _own_ earnings as well. They treated all the money as tainted and returned it to advertisers. After having (carefully) read the (entire) story, I would have done the same thing. This wasn't really a grey-line issue - the guy told his readers to click on ads. That's pretty much a Top-3 way to get kicked out of adsense.

Well, if the author is in contact with the advertiser directly and are selling impression instead of clicks, then why yes, of course the advertiser would be okay with it. Its like TV hosting the ad of the advertiser for a period of time. If the TV wants to tell people buy the advertiser product, then most of the advertiser wouldn't mind.

If however, say KFC is advertising on the TV, and instead of impression, they are taking a cut whenever someone who watched the TV goes to KFC, then the situation would be very different. Which is the case of Google, where each click has a cost.

My advice to him, instead of depending on Google, just get the advertisers directly and just charge by impression, or at least a fix charge for a period of time. Since there are value in the stuff he is doing, I would believe that there would be advertisers willing to pay anyway, just a matter how much.

The only downside going that way, now he has to do the marketing to potential advertisers as well, as opposed to Google doing it for him previously.

I don't see anything in Amazon's terms about what you call "full blown criminal fraud" and I would imagine it is actually encouraged by Amazon. Google is paying for clicks, whereas Amazon is only paying for actual sales.

Amazon would benefit from that message being on every site on the internet. It's advertising for them and letting people know they can help their favorite sites adds an extra incentive to sway people to order stuff.

Agreed, I see many sites even for big charities regularly saying "when you shop Amazon, do so from here." Amazon could stop that in a hurry. They don't.

The open-source video aggregator Miro actually has a Firefox extension that automatically appends Miro's affiliate code if there wasn't already one on the link you followed to Amazon. This is done pretty obviously so I assume that Amazon is aware of it and allows it.

I don't see anything even slightly fraudulent about saying, "Amazon pays us commission on sales made with our affiliate code attached, please buy expensive things there", and I don't see how that's bad for anyone.

Yep, paying a commission for making sure that an intended purchase is made at your site is better than risking losing it to the price comparison lottery; at worst they make a slightly lower profit per sale.

eCommerce vendors are even happy to partner with sites like Quidco that openly offer cashback rewards for people making purchases via their affiliate links.

While Google's customers ARE the advertisers and their first priority is to make sure they are protected, Google would sit up and do something if more website PUBLISHERS would complain. It's a business.

However, as a practical issue, I fail to see any practical reason to disable the guy's revenue from YouTube videos, based on clicks from an unrelated site. Just stop counting the clicks on the site, Google!

He has control over those youtube videos, he should take them down, create all new accounts with his wifes information and then put up the truck videos and pretty soon youtube will put him back into advertising mix. For his other site, if I were him I would run Adbrite.com ads instead of Adwords ads.

Correct, and it's quite possible that Google is undermining its own interests by presenting such incentives.

> However, as a practical issue, I fail to see any practical reason to disable the guy's revenue from YouTube videos . . .

Really? I have thought about it for about two minutes and came up with several.

1. Google might assume that someone who has committed click fraud in the past might do so again, and preemptively remove other facets of that person's ability to harm the system.

2. Google might want to discourage people from committing piecemeal fraud by ensuring them that there is no way to risk just part of your account with Google. By disabling all of this guy's ability to make money from Google, they are sending the signal, "Hey, don't think you can pull a fast one and still keep any part of your business with us, even if the site is unrelated."

3. Maybe there was some undisclosed badness going on with the Youtube account that we are not seeing in the account given in this article.

I don't know about "Criminal Fraud" (that seems rather harsh), but it is in violation of the Amazon Program Participation requirements:

"14. You will not offer any person or entity any consideration or incentive (including any money, rebate, discount, points, donation to charity or other organization, or other benefit) for using Special Links (e.g., by implementing any “rewards” or loyalty program that incentivizes persons or entities to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links). "

This guy really managed to find a lot of ways to shoot himself in the foot.

Consider:

a) Amazon have not cut him off (and I hope someone will draw the risk you highlight to his attention before they do)

b) there's no incentive offered to use the links in the sense of just visiting Amazon. There's an incentive offered to people who make a purchase there, which is an entirely separate act. Now 'visiting' is only offered as an example and he probably is violating the agreement by giving subscription discounts on some purchases, but it's an easy misunderstanding to make, especially given that it's not the central plank of his business model or anything like it.

Ironically, his forthright explanation of how his business model supports a positive interpretation of his motives, because he doesn't even seem to understand the potential pitfalls of what he's doing. If he were the scammer than some are suggesting, it would not be in his interest to expose his methods.

I agree with you that he broke the spirit of Google AdSense CPC program. But Amazon's affiliate program is different. It's OK to incentivize affiliate purchases -- at the end your users are paying real $$$.

> his clear intention is to induce site visitors to make planned purchases through his affiliate links, something that is obviously completely contrary to the spirit of his agreement with Amazon.

Isn't that what affiliate links are for? Encouraging people to buy something through them.

Many review sites right glistening copy then add an affiliate link. is that against the spirit of the agreement too?