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Comment by ryanto | Hacker News Reader

> Where was he deceiving or misrepresenting the situation?

He is deceiving the advertisers. They are paying for people interested in the ad, thats not what they are getting.

> The fact is that there is no tractable way for Google to separate people who are interested in supporting an ad-driven business from those who really are creating false ad traffic for financial gain.

Correct, but we can look at the average CTRs of other sites/blogs that focus on the same subject. That should give us a good understand of foul play (yes, of course there will be some false positives).

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He is running a site about boats, the ads are about boats, and the users are into boats. This is a fuzzy line at best. He did not tell anyone to click on ads. The problem is that google exercises arbitrary power without explaining it, warning you before they do it, etc etc.

Should google have seized the revenue from his YouTube videos? Was he able to talk to someone and explain that they were separate things and get it worked our? No, again, arbitrary power.

The full context of the question is: "if asked how an ad-driven business makes money, how would you, as the business owner, explain it?"

The truth of the situation is: you click, I get paid. There is no moral value attached to such an action in and of itself. If anything, it is Google's own fault for putting itself in a position for charging advertisers to place ads in a medium it does not and cannot control. It is the very definition of a moral hazard.

http://banking.about.com/od/loans/a/MoralHazard.htm

What makes it particularly troubling is that Google not only owns the ad network but also controls the content distribution in the form of Youtube.

Google prides itself as a data-driven company, and this "false positive" is likely due to a "statistical likelihood" of click-fraud, but that's small comfort to a small business owner who does not have the resources to contest or appeal such a heavy-handed measure.

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