Google just shut down our $1M business

> We will (barely) survive

That a single company, in an unrelated market (ads), merely refusing to do business with you, can almost bankrupt you, means it's time for trust-busting. No single company should have such power.

In this particular case, it seems easier said than done?

OP did put eggs in different basquet ( social medias ) but Google will be Google right? What would be the alternative.

Anti-Trust Legislation.

I’m surprised to see that sentiment echoed several times on HN. I’m all about it.

> What would be the alternative

That's the point, there is not alternative at the moment. Breaking up monopolies allows competition and an alternative provider when something like this happens.

Gotcha, yes. Or a least regulate the said monopoly so they provide clear and open guidelines in regard to their policies.

Trust busting or restricting Googles ability to conduct their business as they see fit.

Not something needed in a functioning market but if a company decides and manages to dominate a certain market, the rules change one way or another.

PS: I'm deliberately avoiding the word "monopoly". It's not required in most jurisdictions.

If it wasn't for Google, millions of businesses would never have had a chance to exist, because they didn't have anywhere near the initial budget or right political connections to reach their customers through traditional media. It is a terrible power they have in their hands, but it is leagues better than what was before.

But I think it is outrageous how they mistreat important customers like OP and let some petty employee who probably has never done anything useful in their life destroy the livelihood of other people just out of spite.

If it wasn't for Google, it would be someone else delivering ads online. Gratitude for their near-complete takeover of that market is severely misplaced.

What is hindering someone else from competing with Google on search? Google is awful when it comes to things such as censorship and free speech, but it is a boon to business competition, compared to how things where before.

Search is not new, nor is directory advertising. Google didn’t bring anything to the table in the digital ad world until post-YouTube and Doubleclick acquisition. Overture, aka Yahoo search ads created the ecosystem that Google ultimately cloned for their business model. The only thing that Google really brought value was simple UX and better-than-average search results thanks to PageRank and such. Every B2C service they provide outside of search and gmail came from acquisitions. Google was and always will be fundamentally predisposed to anticompetitive behavior. Their acquisition and slaughter of world-changing technology and holding captive the attention of a generation or more of top talent has cost the world Trillions in opportunity costs IMHO.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/04/google-in...

Ya that’s good for competition right? Regulatory capture?

Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online and their deliberate, persistent efforts to maintain a faceless veneer, through which meaning for customer support, for those businesses is impossible.

I had a rather business that was an AdWords certified partner and I know very deeply how many customers they have had OP’s experience. At this point, it is more important for them to maintain an operation that can ostensibly thrive without humans in the loop than to make money selling ads. That is their strategy, a choice that could have been reversed any time in the past 20 years. See how even their own employees are completely unable to help customers. I think it’s dogshit stance and they should be punished throughly in the marketplace for it. That’s just impossible now due to their size.

> Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online

I couldn't disagree more with you. For anybody selling online, Google brings most if not all paying customers and other search engines bring so few as to be irrelevant. If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete? And don't say that they suffocate competitors because of their size, because they can't bully Apple, Facebook or Microsoft by size.

I don't like Google as a company, they censor, they are corrupt and they mistreat their customers such as OP. There are also search engines that are far better.

But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living. Don't let your hatred blind you. There are fully legitimate businesses that shouldn't be brick-and-mortar and rely on a fair way to get their information out to lots of people. Google makes that possible - for free!

Because they kinda caught the opportunity? If Google didn't, someone else would.

> If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete?

> But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living.

Please note that competition in search market is different from providing small businesses with advertising opportunities. The "blessings" came from their position being the dominant search provider, not from their being Google.

> If Google didn't, someone else would. And where are they? The opportunity is always there and always has been for any tech company willing to rise to the challenge.

> Please note that competition in search market is different from providing small businesses with advertising opportunities.

Search and advertising has the same function: Reaching out to your public. If we look at the humane side instead of the business side, Google helps individuals with a message get a voice and reach out to the world in a way that would be impossible before. Only social media can compete in this, but they are much more heavily censored and suffer much worse discoverability.

I mean, your argument could be applied to any business or anybody who does anything. But the ground truth is that Google did it and kept doing it right for many years. Another dominant actor might have decided to do things other ways, such as maybe letting local business boards decide who gets to appear in online search.

"What is hindering someone else from competing with Google on search? "

Mergers and Acquisitions

https://qz.com/1920334/the-acquisitions-that-built-googles-m...

That's not hindering anybody. It especially is not hindering their competitors Apple, Facebook and Microsoft from competing. Google Search has grown into its size and popularity due to its own merits, and can as easily be replaced.

From the lawyers in that case: “There are no reasonable substitutes for general search services, and a general search service monopolist would be able to maintain quality below the level that would prevail in a competitive market”

I've been using a much better search engine than Google for months now. The free market of the internet and human ingenuity has delivered.

I think you are mistaking Google for "The Internet", believe me, someone else would be thrilled to show us ads.

What's hindering someone else? I'm not talking about ads only, but also search. Google brings customers without the business having to pay anything to anybody or suck up to industry cartels.

There's a meme that ads must be based on covert tracking, and google analytics being everywhere is the most powerful covert tracker, also built into Chrome.

I think ads using tracking are close to worthless and that the whole Analytics/ad industry is just busywork that makes people think they're doing something important. Especially Facebook are good at luring small businesses in and convincing them to "keep trying" with different demographics and parameters to spend more in ads.

I never understood why more businesses don't use discount codes to know where their marketing is having an effect. That's ground truth.

I too remember the vast wasteland that was America before Google: local newspapers, shops, and malls pulling in sustainable revenue in their own markets. It was horrible. Ghastly, really. I much prefer getting everything in my life from one of five west coast billionaires.

But it isn't really Google you are all praising. It's the company that bought them. They just go around using their name because it would have failed if they'd done otherwise.

Companies today are just like life. They don't care about the individual. Just like Life has no problem killing a young innocent child with cancer, Google has no problem killing a thriving business with policy.

For every one person who got a chance, a thousand more were taken away. Such is life, and everyone plays a role not any one place or person. If you want answers on why you got the short end of the stick, you might want to re-evaluate whether you should be spending time worrying about it in the first place.

Unless you are endeavoring in the same business path again, I'd invest my time in retraining and rebuilding rather than getting answers you feel you are owed.

I often ask myself why things are this way, but they are and no amount of getting frustrated will ever help. Even though I might be fully entitled from my point of view, even if I had the worst possible life ever, even if I deserved justice more than anyone else on the planet--it wouldn't matter. Never happens, take it from someone who has been at the absolute lowest and highest and online since the beginning.

Oh right, and the millennials I hate to say it are going to end this world anyway. Everyone knows history will repeat, even if it takes a bit longer to do so this time around. Oh my, I am getting so off topic it hurts, sorry 'bout that!

I struggle to understand your point, but I can only speak for myself coming from a place where there is immense hatred towards young people coming from the old generation. Before Google and social media you couldn't get a business started unless you had old family members "blessing" your endeavour, or had connections with the right political crowd. That would include long years of sucking up and eating abuse to get the chance to "prove your worth" to people who know less than you - if you ever get that chance. Google and - to a lesser extent - social media allows the "millenials" to bypass the gatekeepers and mount successful businesses on their own merits and skills. That is revolutionary! That's the difference between having dignity in your life or staying in the dirt.

> For every one person who got a chance, a thousand more were taken away.

In my view for every one person who lost his chance, a thousand got theirs from Google.

OP seems like he'll hopefully be fine, but there's probably been many people like this who aren't fine.

I'm sure many people lose their jobs when an advertiser is banned for some dumb and false reason.

I'm sure some people fall into depression and commit suicide when their life's work is destroyed.

Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases? Especially when it seems like an honest mistake with no bad intention?

PS: The most aggravating part is that this doesn't even prevent bad actors from using various techniques (identity theft or mass-spawning lots of companies in some lax foreign jurisdiction) to continue operating. This just screws over normal people who fall into some kafkaesque trap based on some rule they didn't know about.

> Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases?

I was in a different but comparable situation with Google. I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.

It's a trivially foreseeable situation, and trivially detected. I bet it's quite common too. If a reasonably intelligent person sat down for five minutes to think about the cancellation process they would identify this branch.

Either those expensive product and software people are incompetent, or they genuinely, deliberately, don't care about edge cases. I can only conclude that it's the second option.

The popular hypothesis is that they couldn't operate at scale without keeping customers away from humans at all costs. But I'm not sure it's true.

I bet there's lots of people who do care, I think it's usually the structure of an organization that stops problems from getting solved and not the moral failing of any individual. It's entirely possible that literally everyone involved wants to get it fixed, there's a ticket with 100 comments below it detailing how the fix will be implemented, but everytime it makes it into the sprint it gets kicked out and quarter or two because something mission critical always comes up.

Yes, that's very plausible that things could play out that way. But when the stakes are this high, and in an organization as highly staffed as Google, that's pure negligence. Someone designed these emails I'm getting, and designed the workflow.

Not caring about such basic edge cases makes them incompetent, of course.

> I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.

What about sending them a physical, certified letter? Have your lawyer write it.

Their only legal address is in the US. I'm in the UK, and stopped short of looking for a solicitor who would be able to handle this. I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.

The punchline is that the American collections agency they use actually do respond to email and (I believe) dealt with it. But for it to go as far as a collections agency was nuts.

Don't they have a legal address in the UK, like for tax purposes?

> I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.

You should!

Nope. I was doing business with Google Ireland. For a while we were all in the EU though...

But the threatening emails came from Mountain View.

This page is all you get: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275

That shouldn't stop you from contacting Google Ireland. They are part of the same company and are their local legal presence after all. If you send them a certified letter and they sign for it, that's it.

Yeah, with 190k headcount most of these people aren’t exactly head of the class.

You're kidding right? Google's average employee is almost assuredly more capable than top performers in almost any other company. They probably have more actual "head of the class" people than any other company on the planet.

Googlers are more capable than other top performers? Well, yes, but that comes with some gigantic caveats.

The main thing Google has been consistently great at is designing algorithms and systems to process large amounts of data efficiently. You can't take that away from them, of course.

But that's one of the smallest parts about building beautiful software.

When it comes to other important things: understanding how to build products that are loved(particularly in the social space), or understanding the human element, they've been woefully inadequate on a comical level.

That's till they learn the Google way, which seems to be: never contradict the algorithms

So can I create a Google Ad about a competitors domain which will flag Google thinking that they have two accounts running two ad campaigns for the same website?

Interesting

You can certainly try. I wouldn’t give it much chance of success.

Plus you login from same ip

Moderation is the dual of denial of service. Every moderation primitive is a denial of service primitive, and every denial of service primitive is a moderation primitive - what moderation really is is the denial of service actions we believe are prosocial.

If you penalize people for engaging in link-farming SEO, the SEO people who's tricks don't work anymore will go into business doing "negative SEO" for hire or as extortion. When people use DDoS as an act of protest (I don't know if this still happens but it did circa 2010 when the Anonymous hacktivist movement was active), you can view that as similar "community moderation" to flagging posts on HN, but on the IP level. (I am not endorsing DDoS, I am just illustrating the duality. My point is technical and not political.)

Keep this in mind when you write moderation primitives. They will be abused.

Moderation isn't usually a problem when there are humans in the loop who review that stuff. Google's problem is that they want to offer business services companies will depend on without providing real support for their users. The have so much money they could easily afford to have staff working with customers, investigating fraud, and using sound judgement, but they refuse because it's easier to stuff their pockets with the money they save by screwing people over.

Yes. This works even better if you use a coupon code.

For every story like this on HN, there is some factor more in the world that don't get written about and business quietly die at the whim of google's algorithms. There is no recourse, for you are too small to matter.

Not the first time, won't be the last. Google is an egocentric company with a nihilistic and destructive indifference towards its customers. Fortunately people are learning to avoid Google products, as seen with Stadia's demise. Here are some other instances of Google's negligence:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193857

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912

So sorry it happened, But your budget could afford $5-10k per month for SEO. Which in 6-12 months could provide you with a comparable volume of organic traffic.

Also, lead generation can help with this problem. I don't know what you sell, but let's imagine it is eco phone cases. So, you register a domain name bestecophonecases.com with a new company(no law prevents you from that) and open a Google Ads account from another company, phone number and website. From accounting point of view, this company is 0 profit advertisement agency. With lead generation templates and webflow, Tilda and other cms it all can be done within a day. Saying from my personal experience, after I purchased a 20 years old domain name that was banned in Google Ads 10 years ago which they refuse to unban.

the latest Google ads UI is confusing AF. I think I actually have 3 or 4 different accounts (manager and managed) just because I couldn't make heads or tails of that UI at some point. Time to clean them up! My condolences for getting bit like that.

Haha, you fell victim to the algorithm and they don’t care! That’s by design!

Look, they have an app that makes money. They care only about the app.

The only proper response is to take what you’ve learned and make your own app, an app that plays within their undefined rules. Oh, and makes money.

They don’t care. You’re an error, an exception, and a money pit. Better to cut ties than to deal with you. If the product is spoiled, throw it away.

Only solution is to work with some of Google Ads Partners to run Ads on their behalf.

This is why I also fear using Google Cloud. You might do something weird to get banned from YouTube or Google Ads and then next thing you know you've lost access to your Google account including Google Cloud. Good luck if you used any proprietary GCP services.

These worries don't matter as much if you're large enough to have a human sales rep, but as a smaller company, a false positive algorithmic suspension can shut down your business.

You have my full sympathy. Growing and sustaining a company is not easy at the best of times.

I have zero sympathy for Google when it comes to their monopoly potentially (hopefully) being challenged both by competitors and lawmakers.

So basically, you got banned for a valid reason, also you basically admitted to creating another account to get around violations, which is quite obviously against their policies...?

What about involving lawyers? It happened once that Google banned my Adsense account and didn't pay $30k, which were the earnings of the launch month of my website. They didn't provide any reason at all. I gave the case to a lawyer and after one year they apologized, reinstated the account and paid what was due.

This happened to me as well, same exact scenario. Created a separate ads account to keep my business away from my personal stuff. On Feb 21 I got an email saying that my 2nd account is suspended. Amusingly, the personal account seems to be fine (no ads currently running), but I assume that if I start a campaign on it it's going to get banned as well?

Just a lesson - relying on some big tech monopoly or another might make things a bit easier or more profitable but you can be SQUASHED LIKE A BUG and nobody there will care. They don't have to.

The all or nothing approach that Google takes on situations like this is crazy to me. Same with previous posts, they seem to love swinging the eternal ban hammer.

this resonates with me a bit, but i was in and out early and quickly. and, i agree with others that monopoly power is hurting us (thank you, Supremes).

i did some google advertising, and tried to do more, but got banned -- one of my sites/accounts -- for illegal category or something -- i was trying to launch a tech support business -- which i guess had been banned because of the indian tech support scams (sorry, my indian peeps).

i was thinking about doing about a grand over the first month -- then see what i had -- i thought it was weird, first of all, because... why let a tech support business sign up to advertise if... you don't allow it?

but then, you do allow it.

until you don't any longer.

and in the banning and unbanning, i would get calls from google account managers wanting to help me set up my account(s), and they didn't know which ones were suspended and why, and couldn't do anything about it/them, and couldn't tell me anything about it/them.

none of it _really_ suprised me, but also, all of it did.

i kind of thought, oh, i'm gonna just turn on some ads and see if anyone starts clicking - i'll literally know in about 5 minutes if my business is gonna fly - this is gonna be awesome.

but it was a few weeks of back and forth and emails and support centers and phone calls and frustrations and business changes and on and on and on.

and the infamous -- what do you call them -- google UIs -- the banality of evil of google's UIs -- that's how i'd characterize them. you interact with them, you do things, you submit things, and they just stare at you and occasionally blink. no change of state. nada. pretty hardcore.

the frustrating part was - i didn't know all that. if i had a friend who knew what this kafkaesque (i don't know what this means, but people say it a lot and i think it means 'bad') world could be like if you didn't know how to navigate it properly, then i would have had very different expectations, so probably a very different overall experience.

my timeline started telescoping outwards -- from an expectation of ads running within 5 minutes, to and hour, to 2 or 3 hours, to a business day, to a business week, to two weeks, to a month plus, to alternatives like fakebook and all the rest.

my realistic expectations now, were i to attempt again to advertise, or to help anyone else do some google ads (god help them), it'd be like....

  this might not work. we can try it, because all the other options are probably trash too, but if you're a professional -- i.e. you're a six figure-type person, and maybe even if not, just pay someone something to help you do it, because otherwise we might get turned into an insects and just lose the emotional energy to properly complete our task.

Google is useless the day ChatGPT include the links to website.

it already does tell people to go to sites, but it also lies about what's there.

https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/dont-believe-chatgpt

ChatGPT is a convincing fiction generator. Any facts it produces are purely coincidental.

It's just really good at mansplaining and gaslighting people about things it knows nothing about.

Google just sends you to random websites where regular humans “mansplain and gaslight”?

ChatGPT is meant to mimic a human. Not be some god like arbtrar of truth. No such entity will ever exist.

It doesn't have to be a god-like arbiter of truth, it just needs to use actual facts that it can source, not just make stuff up out of thin air, which is exactly what it does.

I asked it recently about how Fermat's Last Theorem was discussed in Star Trek (referencing the episode where Picard is talking to Riker about how it's never been solved, though in reality it was solved less than 10 years after the episode aired), and it wrote a very convincing answer that was complete BS, making up details in different episodes that didn't actually happen. It's easy to get detailed plot summaries of these episodes from Wikipedia or Memory Alpha, so I'm really curious how ChatGPT got its info, or if it just likes to make things up that sound plausible but are completely wrong. Just for starters, according to ChatGPT, Picard did not talk about Fermat's theorem; Data did!

Is "mansplain" just being used to mean "explain in a condescending way" in this context?

I always took "mansplain" to be an explanation taken to be delivered in a condescending way because of the genders of the speaker and receiver in question. The use of the term in and of itself usually saying more about the person using the word than the subject of the offense.

> because of the genders of the speaker and receiver in question

That's what I was trying to understand. ChatGPT doesn't have a gender, nor is it aware of the gender of the person talking to it, unless explicitly told. Wouldn't that preclude it from mansplaining?

Because people want to move from typing or sating two words to search vs having a 10 minute conversation where you fight with a politically bias AI

check out https://www.perplexity.ai/

I am unable to understand what happened: can you explain it from the very beginning?

tl;dr he created 2 google adsense accounts for the same thing just in different regions and that violates google's policy so they shut'm down

It would be interesting to see a 2-line chatGPT summary of the same text.

Per ChatGPT summarizing the OP:

    The author received an email from Google stating that their account had been permanently suspended due to violating Google policies. The author had created a second Google Ads account as a risk management strategy to ensure their main account could continue running if it received a violation. However, they were unaware that creating multiple Google Ads accounts is against policy and was subsequently banned from advertising on Google for life. The author had been working with Google account managers to prepare for launching in Germany but accidentally added the wrong domain to an ad, resulting in their main account being suspended again.

    The author expressed frustration with Google's policy enforcement and loss of faith in the company, despite being a legitimate eco-friendly product seller with trademarks and in-house inventory. The author shared their story as a cautionary tale to others who may consider creating multiple Google Ads accounts.

Thanks. It wasn't as concise as I'd hoped for (I wanted about the same number of words as the parent comment) but it's a good summary.

Hmm. It misses the ironic 'thanks to HN advice' point, and more importantly it mixes up suspensions (if I understand correctly): the main ads account was not suspended again *. First the secondary ads account was suspended and only then the main ads account.

* This proves ChatGPT has no world model. If it had one, it would have been aware that undoing a Google suspension is impossible, therefore no account can be suspended twice. /j

This is much better than OP though. It’s always confusing when people jump from one thing to another, while renaming things on the fly or implying details that are obvious only if you already know the picture. What chatgpt is really good at is structured narrative, even if it misses a couple of details here and there.

I got -3 for asking that question, I guess there are more people that do text summarizing for a living than I expected on HN.

It missing the ironic point isn't that big of a deal in a summary tbh, I wouldn't have included that either. Your other point stands though, that's an important detail to get right ä.

> I got -3 for asking that question, I guess there are more people that do text summarizing for a living than I expected on HN.

I think it's because people are leery of threads being taken over by GPT produced comments. But so long as the requests/GPT comments/ are clearly marked, not too many, and with some justification for the request, I don't mind.

If I understood they were banned from google ads (merchand center) because they used 2 accounts to promote the same activity, but if this is against the policy I don't understand what is the point, I don't think that the size of the market is a discriminant in the policy

Perhaps between "normal" and "insta-perma-death" they should have some intermediate state, like "suspended-for-a-week" or "under-parole".

This is Google we're talking about, where you can only talk to robots.

They're big enough to owe society better customer support than robots. Bust 'em up (antitrust), this ain't what a healthy market looks like.

I've talked several times to support after probably 30 clicks to get to a human and they are afraid of the rules. Google's support people doesn't provide support only can give you all their empathy for your situation

YouTube have some intermediate states for copyright violations, so it's possible.