Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

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  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.

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