Google bans yet another small business
dkzlv.com
dkzlv.com
I don’t like the ad model of the internet (adbusters subscriber here) but this has me very sympathetic. Where do you go to get attention? Google and Facebook have made sure all eyes are on them, so if you want eyeballs, you must pay.
I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt here.
Opinions are my own.
Tbh, any ads with the phrase "get out of debt" sounds very shady to me. I wouldn't give it the benefits of doubt personally.
> Microsoft never answered at all. After two weeks of silence I reached out to them myself, and the agent tried to be nice, but the phrase “I understand your feelings, but, I’m afraid you’re banned for life and this cannot be changed” just broke me.
If two companies with 100% different spam & abuse systems detected something wrong with this ads, I have the feeling we're not hearing the full story here. Microsoft even went to the extreme of "ban-for-life".
Do we know this for sure, or are we assuming they only use in-house resources to determine "suspiciousness"? Could they both be contracting out to the same third-party for some additional trustworthiness signal?
Yes, that is true and was the big red flag for me. I believe it would be in their best interest to exchange the data on potential fraudsters, because it would make their life simpler.
But for what it's worth I went to Google's financial services advertising page and quickly identified at least a few items that might be the cause of an issue. It seems likely that some of these items, like providing a physical address, would also be required by Microsoft. It's also worth noting that the service seems to be offered from Russia and I know that many countries are currently sanctioning parts of the Russian economy to some degree or another, which seems possibly relevant.
> Google's financial services advertising page
Can you give me the link?
> It's also worth noting that the service seems to be offered from Russia
That is true. But Google is available in Russia and allows businesses to buy ads without any limits. I know a Russian service called raindrop.io (bookmark sync app) that buys ads in Google and runs a worldwide service, and they get no bans.
Also if you intend to advertise in countries with stricter requirements e.g. the UK or the EU there are additional obligations you need to meet such as business verification:
> For the purposes of this policy, we consider financial products and services to be those related to the management or investment of money and cryptocurrencies, including personalised advice
We don't do anything of this kind. We're basically an excel spreadsheet with your expenses, no "money" actually involved here.
You literally have a service for money management that also according to you provides an “advice”.
*Planning and budgeting
This would be considered financial advice under UK law for example.
You are running a weird looking service from Russia, stating that it falls under Russian law, no contact details no business registration info.
The name is dodgy as hell, and overall it looks to be more like sage books for a small scale illicit operation than a budget planning app for Grandma.
There are plenty legitimate budget apps out most of them rely on open banking standard rather than CSV/OFX import or manual entry.
Pretty much nothing here seems to be useful to the average user, however if I ever decide to start selling dirty bombs (hi NSA…) on the black market and I need to run my books somewhere I might give it a go.
Not necessarily, My MS Ad account I created for a product in my previous startup was not approved because I didn't enable international payments on my debit card(India) and it was declined 'once'. No second attempts, No means to add another card. Support just said 'Sorry we cannot enable your account'.
The product eventually got selected for acceleration by a FAANG company and did well. So it's MS loss that it failed to earn some money from me, But I understand that this could be fatal for a small business relying on these Internet custodians and they making flawed arbitrary decisions.
I can't find the social media 'trust and safety' info sharing thing now it might have been zuckerberg congressional testimony (for whatever that's worth)
In other words: The existence of hundreds of thousands of happy white people make it unlikely that a black guy could get targeted by two racists. Clearly cop A who allegedly broke his right leg and cop B who allegedly broke his left leg are to be found not guilty asap so they wont have to miss their biweekly KKK meetup. /s
The most hilarious part about the comment is the implication that the greats of silicon valley haven't been repeatedly caught in various shady backroom dealings meant to enrich themselves at the cost of literally everyone else on the planet.
Also, FWIW, I have found that it doesn't usually go over well to compare my non-civil rights struggle with civil rights struggles. It just . . . you know, it implies a level of injustice that simply isn't supportable and it doesn't come off right. Just my 2c.
So they've got a (haphazard, ham-fisted, obscure) mechanism for removing stuff they consider undesirable. It costs them money, but they hope the balance is positive by keeping their reputation up.
That mechanism has both false positives and false negatives (as well as being flagrantly subjective), because it's far, far, far too much for them to examine each case closely. It may be your lifeline, but to them it's just another $10e2 in a $10e11 revenue stream.
The effects do not always have to be immediate, Google once got caught reducing its labor pool by agreeing not to hire from the competition. At first glance you would think that less workers would result in higher wages when it actually fucked over the workers a dozen times harder because they could no longer get alternative jobs in the area.
I'll never understand how HN works, honestly.
That being said, Google and Microsoft (or any of the FAANG squad, for that matter) are certainly not your friends in this situation. But are they culpable? I doubt it. This boils down to a human reading your ad and disliking the tone/contents wholesale. It ultimately doesn't matter how your project is licensed, how transparent your company is or who you're working for: the goal of ad-checkers are to mitigate the risk associated with advertising such a diverse range of products. Since you posted an ad for a relatively high-risk product (handles money, integrates with crypto, is a subscription service), it makes perfect sense to me that you got denied access.
A service about money like this one is a very sensitive business. I'm not sure it's the encryption or privacy the problem. Google has to protect it's ad readers and when in doubt, they probably prefer to avoid it.
As this business is probably starting, it has quasi zero credibility in term of honesty. Other marketing strategies should be used to bootstrap it and grow it's user base. Once it will have a few years without any problem and happy users, it would be more trustable.
The whole account was banned, that's why. The ad actually passed the moderation and even had 200 impressions.
> Other marketing strategies should be used to bootstrap it and grow it's user base
It's pretty common for the new players to burn money on ads, because it's scalable and predictable. So it actually would be super difficult to run the app for a few years without any predictable traffic source.
I'm sorry about the difficulty you are facing. As I said, it is a difficult business because you have to build up trust. Too many scammers out there. You should do everything to build up this trust and a good reputation. If you are based in Russia or some eastern country, it will be even harder. The banned account is harsh.
Still it's hard to understand this decision.