Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous
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They also made it seem like I was some cyber criminal by suggesting that if I tried to create another account, they would automatically take that down too.
This is what a monopoly looks like.
What are you looking for that it or others don’t offer?
I didn't test this one.
Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.
Any insight on what a reasonable amount of traffic amounts to based on your experience?
I don’t remember specifically but I feel like we probably moved off Adsense when we were around 50k uniques/mo, but for a fairly specific niche.
One idea is to investigate who advertises on similar sites and examine their traffic/rates to see where you match up.
Big red flag. If you are connecting random people via video chat you open yourself to all sorts of abuse. I'm not saying that it is happening on your service, just that advertizers (and therefore google) are wary of videochat.
I doubt it had anything to do with the video chat aspect though.
This is the link they pointed me to in their suspension email https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/2375414 Given that I received no warning, they must have suspended me for an "egregious violation" of which they define five:
- Circumventing systems
- Counterfeit
- Promotion of unauthorized pharmacies
- Unacceptable business practices
- Trade Sanctions violation
I am really curious what their algorithm saw in my little chess website that suggests that I'm peddling pharmaceuticals, counterfeiting money, or selling banned technology to unsavory regimes. Heck, I don't even accept payments!
My best guess is that their algorithm panicked because I have that automatic redirect to a new unique URL when you click to start a new game. Apart from that, I have no idea what it could possibly be.
> Google Ads counterfeit vs. DMCA/Copyright/Pirated products
> Counterfeiters mimic the trademark brand features, rather than copying the product itself (software, books, artwork, movies, etc.).
Couldn't have been.
I left Google's indexing system 10 years ago, but back then, I made some inelegant workarounds to prevent these features from breaking duplicate page detection. I'm nearly certain the code I wrote has all been replaced with something Chrome-based, but I'm just trying to think of things that could trip up page analysis.
I could see how very rare patterns that are typically used to intentionally trip up page analysis might put your pages on some bad actor list. I really have very little idea how these auto-detection systems are implemented, and these are wild guesses, but they're hopefully better than nothing.
It's reassuring to hear that a former Google engineer shares my same suspicions as to why this happened. Thank you.
$3k/month to an agency to handle all the Google/Bing/FB ad campaigns and A/B testing and to deal with Google's automated BS gives us close to 10x the ROI.
Google might prefer to get broken up for monopoly before the racketeering cases get started.
after one year I wanted to integrate Google ads into another my side project and my account was still blocked (I took down my first application and re-applied again without any success)
One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article?
It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.
It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
These sorts of gauntlets are much more life or death than a CSE program, where you are guaranteed at least a decent paying job if you make ok grades. On the other hand, pressure of not even knowing how many years before you can pay down your 300k+ professional school debt and start your life hanging over your head humbles you fast, compared to someone who turns in their capstone project and walks into 200k/yr.
My back of napkin math from another comment:
I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter. * Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more) That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day * If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day * If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees * If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers. * Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter * The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
Meaning that if someone uses 4 Google products they are contacting Google support on average once a quarter? That seems really high. I would have guessed at most a tenth of that.
But this is a fair point, all the assumptions I make (eg. how many products a user uses, number of requests for support, etc.) are hypothetical and might be incorrect if this was actually implemented. Based on my judgement though, while variable might change, the end numbers will probably remain the same.
However, more importantly: going in with a "we need to support this" mindset alters incentives. Suddenly, useless error messages and lacking documentation aren't okay any more.
A different approach to solve the issue, if it even exists at that scale: make them pay for it. If you want service, pay $10. That's more than enough cover Google's cost and it's cheap for anyone that really requires service because e.g. their account has been locked, or Google's systems have disabled ads on their site. At the same time, it's expensive enough that you don't get flooded with "why do you show me those videos on the front page?" requests.
For power users, I completely agree it might be the only feasible idea.
The closest parallel I can think of Amazon where there is cost of products involved (and >> $10 year I suspect) - they do a good job but even they work hard to make sure you cant easily reach a person.
These apologies to mega corporate is very sad. I am disappointed in you.
A lot of the problem is that when Google screws up, there's no recourse. We don't hear much about when Google gets it right because those people's problems were solved. Surely some significant portion of the incidents you mentioned above fall into that category.
One would hope transparent, clear rules and enforcement would prevail. But ambiguity and silence are far less expensive.
I think the old internet was a lot better because the ratio of moderators to users was much, much higher and the moderators tended to be well informed enthusiasts that were usually running the site and had the ability / authority to fix anything / everything.
The easy solution to me is just add money. Let me pay on-demand for support. I've had a GSuite account for ages and never needed help with anything, but if my account got locked and I needed to talk to a human with the ability / authority to unlock it I wouldn't hesitate to pay $50-$100.
IMO part of the problem at Google is likely years and years of bragging instead of building and the tooling is probably absolute garbage to the point that a human wouldn't make a difference. That's why I say 3 mins seems low. I bet there are a lot of things that a human couldn't fix even if they wanted to.
It's pure speculation, but makes sense to me.
What happened to the math here? I'm not following this step?
Scalability of algorithims is how they became a behemoth in the first place. I would call it being ruthlessly un-ideological in a sense. While there are implicit goals the approach is more "whatever works" for the system as a whole. While annoying it isn't a breaking point that gets people to exodus.
It is ultimatelty "democratic" in being what is wanted instead of what makes sense. Like the yotube advertiser exoduses where they stupidly think they need "advertiser friendly" content or it will harm their brand when nobody gives a fuck that they advertise on content where people swear or talk about sex.
How hard it is to gate algorithmic decision making by (sum_of_ad_money_from_customer(x) > SOME_AMOUNT) goto human_review;
Also, it was probably a bad idea for Google and Facebook to be so cavalier while they destroyed print advertising (i.e. the press).
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, as they say.
They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves.
As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.
Not super positive but still.
And before you say "Aha! There you go assuming malice instead of incompetence" - keep in mind that Google has used this "our algorithm is objective so we don't manipulate what appears on our search pages" for years and years. It's the go-to strategy they use to appear neutral when called upon by governments.
Facebook has also attempted something similar in recent cases.
So, it's a kinda wink-wink nudge-nudge pact, that Google politically aligns with the Democrats, and the Democrats turn a blind eye on Google's monopolistic state.
There are plenty of examples, just try searching "Newsom Estate" on Google [0] vs DuckDuckGo [1] and count critical vs. approving articles out of first 10 results.
I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Doubly so when you read the sources listed as they're all regurgitating the conspiracy-fodder into one another.
Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap').
So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.
DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second.
The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.
When people assume malice so often as you mentioned, it, at least intuitively, feels easier to fault human moderation than algorithms.
Algorithms offer a black box which protect against accusations of bias. If accused of bias, an algorithm's biases can just be labeled unintentional accidents, whereas a human's biases are malicious.
Do we really believe Google does not have the resources to hire and retain competent people? or are they willfully incompetent as a shield or cover for their malice
How many times can they play "oops our bad it was just a mistake"
It's not worth it for Google to fix rare edge cases; fixing them manually may even bias the models to cause problems for a greater number of sites. I am sure the models are trained as well as humanly possible; there are millions of dollars on the table at the fringes. Every employee's time is most valuably spent improving the models as a whole and not chasing down one-off edge-cases unless it's for a very high profile client. I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists).
Accept AdSense for what it is; a highly-profitable-for-Google way to use ML to turn HTTP into $$$. It will not work for every site, only 99.99xx% of them.
Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?
That's really easy to understand.
Humans cost money, algorithms are free.
Also, Google is full of the kind of people that 'don't understand humans' and 'understand algorithms very well'.
To Google, the answer to all of life's problems is probably 'an algorithm'.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.
The scale is not the problem, the profiteering is.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
Also, we have no idea how their support teams metrics are doing. Maybe the automation is actually superior to human customer service.
From the outside of the castle, what we see is more a result of our projections rather than what's going on inside.
There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this.
Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.
To mis-quote Arthur C Clarke, any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Like in Gmail Google ads "pretend" to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails.
(Sure there is a small Ad label but it's indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject)
Similar things can be observed fruit custom page/domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.
I suppose this suggests some manner of "fairness" to Google's widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can't keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody's getting an unfair advantage.
Then the next day it's fine.
"Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose" reads one.
While I have NO IDEA what that's about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it's because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I've read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever.
Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?
We've reported it, never heard back from Google. It went away after a few days each time, and hasn't happened in two or three years, at least not to any site I'm involved with.
Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream.
There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.
We have tried a lot of different advertising networks and sadly we have found none that's even in the same ballpark as AdSense (revenue wise). Advertising on the web is a shit show.
Where google has all of them beat is payment terms - net 21 is hard to beat.
They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long.
My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned.
And it's been that way since. No recourse. Just ... shut out.
This was a site with 100% user-generated content. If Google can't handle something like that, well ...
Which is why I stated that they should be run secondary to AdSense. At least they'd be ready to go when Google decided to shut Techdirt down.
Something is better than nothing.
I'm talking $0.01 - $0.05 CPM when Adsense was averaging ~ $3
There are two companies that could have helped minimize Adsense's monopoly but decided not to: Microsoft and Facebook.
It seems obvious in hindsight that the acquisition would kill competition but at the time, it didn't seem so. Like right now, in hindsight, Facebook's acquisition of instagram should be blocked - at the time it looked risky.
Same with Google's acquisition of youtube.
Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article would be, "Why is Techdirt closing down?". Their support page[0] lists 8 different revenue sources other than Google Ads.
And this is precisely the type of diversity that you want. Signing up for 5 different ad networks isn't really good diversity, because:
A) your different revenue streams are cannibalizing each other (there's a limit to how many different ad networks you can shove on the same page), so you can't grow your revenue as you diversify,
but more importantly,
B) many of the factors that affect one ad network (ad blocking, political pressures and privacy laws, fundamental inability to moderate well) will affect all of them.
It's not good to have 5 different revenue streams that can all simultaneously be destroyed by the same event. In that scenario you've increased complexity, but you haven't gotten a significant gain in reliability. On the other hand, pulling in money from advertising, Patreon, merchandise, product commissions, and even Kickstarter campaigns means that no single event will ruin your site.
I think it's important for people looking to diversify income streams to think about what each new income stream offers, rather than just duplicating an existing stream X times. I don't see any advantage in having 5 different frameworks for serving ads on a single site. I see a lot of advantages from setting up a Patreon on the side and selling podcast ads outside of your site.
Sure, Techdirt is hedging its bets and saying it might turn Google Ads back on eventually. But the account issues they're talking about aren't going to go away; there's nobody you can yell at with Google to make their moderation suddenly better.
I still want to push the idea that if you're diversifying your income, you should actually diversify it, not just have multiple accounts in the same field. There are independent issues that might effect one ad network and not another, sure. Those independent issues also won't affect podcast ads or product sponsorships.
In other words, redundancy != diversity.
Not to say redundancy is useless, of course. But it really doesn't sound like redundancy is Techdirt's problem here, it sounds like they're disillusioned with page ads in general.
Playing the guessing game is not helpful. In my experience, things just go dark and you get very little or no helpful messaging about resolving the problem.
In my experience, you can usually find something that COULD be the cause by digging through analytics/reports, if you can demonstrate that you took positive action on this, and get it infront of the right support people, they can sometimes help you out and ask for your account to be re-evaluated. You will never, ever find out if this is the reason they disabled your account in the first place though.
Then, prepare for your account to be paused again.
So my attitude is pretty simple: Google can fuck off. They can't even fix their own properties and will ban you for their inability to do so.
As a seller of advertising space, to what extent is Google obligated to fill your inventory? How reliant are you on assumptions about whether they will and how much?
I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.
"Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?" Anyone have more detail on this?
I thought it might be a cryptohijacker but I dug thru elements, code & did some packet captures. I couldn't spot what the issue was - I couldn't even confirm it was ads.
(But then I remembered that it has literal databases of incredibly personal realtime info on billions of people, and lets police peruse locations of people that committed no crime.)
Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.
I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an <ad> html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.
So Google turned the filter sensitivity up to 11 just now huh? I don't get why techdirt insists that that is not about ideology.
Normally this would be a bad idea, but lots of people do it.
I really wish Congress' investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse.
Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.
Tort is very important for a functioning free market. The government just doesn't have the capability to police everyone, and civil court allows the people to police each other. Which exactly why large corporations move to eliminate their civil liability with users.
It would indeed be surprising. Also unfortunate and counterproductive.
As with many sites that put competent effort into thoughtful moderation, some of Techdirt's best content shows up in article comments.