Goodbye AdSense
acme.com
acme.com
That's not a duplicate account Google, it's called a brother!
You use your real name on one service, you get banned. You use a fake name on another service, you get banned.
Also - some people don't have mobile phone because they don't want to be available all the time. As popular as moblie phones are, there is no law that says everyone should have them.
On the topic of their "secret" detection, it doesn't work well. In 2007 when I was in high school an acquaintance had a web page with google adverts on, there was no content beyond what came with a free template he downloaded. Every day he would arrive at school, login to the computer system and click an advert on his website, he would then go home and do the same, he would also contact other people from school via instant messengers and have them do the same, it became some what of a ritual for him. He was making $100 per month from what I recall and this went on for a while. This is the sort of abuse that should be detected very easily; abuse from the same IPs with a set pattern and yet it never was... I have no confidence in a system that can't detect this sort of abuse.
A friend of mine had an Adsense account and would click on his own advertisements while in school. He would do this every day in the same class. He would also ask other students in the class to do the same thing. Each month, he would show me the check he received from Google.
I too had an Adsense account but I ended up losing my account about a month later. Only problem is, I was running a legitimate forum in which there were 300+ people that were active. This forum was created because we all played the same online game and created clans. We used the forum to keep in touch with other clans and to strategize. Never did I click on my own advertisements.
Once I lost my Adsense account, I reported my friends account but nothing ever happened except he kept receiving his check each month.
If that's all there is to the story, you come across as a bit of a dick. If you didn't have any problem with his behaviour when you were getting paid, why did you report him when you were banned? I'm not saying reporting him, out of context, was the wrong thing to do, but the context you provided makes you seem petty.
Yes, precisely. A lot of other folks have chimed in with similar stories. I think their process is broken and I would like to help them fix it, both for my own monetary enrichment and because I still like Google.
We tracked conversions, where possible, on our advertisers end and used that data to calculate conversions per click for our publishers. We'd use this metric, mixed with a few others (ctr, # of impressions, # of fraudulent clicks, etc, but mainly weighted towards cvr) to generate a quality score for the publisher. The quality score was between 0 and 1, 1 being "awesome" and 0 being "awful".
We'd use this quality score to discount the price per click publisher was paid. AdSense is likely doing something similar because their CPC/CPM rate/split is undisclosed and very private- likely because publishers will get paid drastically different amounts per click depending on their traffic history.
Anyways, when a publisher falls bellow a certain quality threshold, we'd drop their account because they are, in the end, not making the advertiser any money and likely hurting our future relationship with the people that pay the bills.
Social traffic usually falls into this poor quality area into this area because it doesn't convert well, has a low click through rate, and includes lots of accidental clicks.
There are absolutely ways to educate publishers and advertisers, but the easiest solution for the network is to just nip it at the bud and drop low-quality traffic.
I experienced another surreal variant of this a few years ago. We had some 200 domains in GoDaddy's "Cash Parking" program. They were there for probably a year when someone made the observation that the ads on these parked domains were all served by Google. Google, at the time, offered something called "AdSense for Domains". We decided to switch all domains to Google's domain parking program and cut out GoDaddy. No delusions here, neither service was going to make any money but it seemed a better idea to let parked domains host relevant ads without unpaid GoDaddy ads.
Now, to be clear, when you make this switch Google controls the content on the domains and, of course, they own search.
All went well. The domains started to show ads as expected. Then, out of nowhere, Goggle kills our account. No recourse. No intelligent conversations. A totalitarian and decidedly-evil "we are done" of sorts.
Not one person from the office clicked on any ads. Far too busy making real money to do crap like that.
Several of the domains we parked belonged to clients for whom legitimate sites were being created. Google's actions were brutally violent. There's almost no other way to describe it.
Being that they are a de-facto monopoly I would imagine that a time might come when they migh lock horns with exactly the wrong person or entity and end-up on the receiving end of congressional action or some such thing. I really do hope this happens and that they suffer serious damage because of it.
It is so ironic and frustrating to come across site after site with crap content full of Google ads and, on the other hand, to see honest site operators being punished by having an important source of revenue cut-off like that.
I love many of Google's products but AdSense and AdWords' management, policies and their brutal handling of honest users who add nothing but value is nothing less than evil.
Now, let's assume I was guilty of click fraud that they are accusing me of with Adsense, kicking me off GAN which was all commission based (% of an order from my sites) makes no sense at all to me from a business standpoint.
"I can't easily imagine Jef Poskanzer was click-spamming AdSense, while at the same time I trust the judgment and abilities of the AdSense team. +Jef Poskanzer , I hope someone digs into the case to investigate deeply and reaches out if there's any more info we can share."
I have to agree, though the robotic reply with non-specific answers doesn't help one bit. Edit: In reference to the article, not this post.
"Thanks for raising this Matt. I work with the Ad Traffic Quality Team and we'll look into this and investigate right away. I'll reach out to Jef to discuss in more detail."
Yes Jeff was making a fair amount of money and why not? For all the work he put in through the years, why not get a monetary compensation that will allow him to at least cover the hosting expenses. If Google turns back and says yes we made a mistake, we are reinstating your account, will Jeff go back to them or will he say eff this.
It is very difficult for someone to forget when they have been treated unfairly.
Again the above is all what-if scenarios but just saying...
I asked about whether one website offering a free AdSense coupon was sponsored by Google or not, and I received contradicting answers.
Edit: The website was www.googleadwordspromos.com/ and an example of conflicting answers is here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/adwords/thread?tid=62a...
This has been the case with Google forever(and discussed on HN multiple times), you get customer support if you are notable or raise a big enough stink.
Reason Google does it, is because they are not a customer centric company, they are engineer driven company(or at least used to be, what they are now is an open question). They save serious amount of money by not having human employees evaluate each AdSense account on case by case basis.
Just don't put all your eggs in Google basket is all I can say.
I would even go as far as to say that I suspect fraudulence from Google in this case, if they were honest why don't they offer proper support and help in cases like this? Imagine any other business doing this, a bank "We have closed your account and frozen all your money because our secret algorithm indicates that you have violated our agreement. We won't say what in our agreement you have violated, you have one appeal and after that the final decision is made" and the response to the appeal "We have read your appeal, but decided that our secret algorithm made the right call, and you have violated a part of our agreement, but we still won't say what part."
Why aren't Google called out more on things like this? Their business needs to be regulated just as much as any other businesses.
What surprises me much more is that there is still no valid alternative. After 8 years! MS has tried to build something and failed. Y! of course failed. Then there's Entrieweb's SpeedyAds which are so bad I think they are not even working on them any more. Nobody seems to be able to build a system that is as efficient as G's in matching content with ads, even thou it would be highly profitable.
Anyway; you cannot argue with them and it makes me upset that they would do this like this. I like their products, but their adsense and adwords 'policies' are insane; you are making them money both ways and with adwords you are a paying client, yet there is no-one you can call or mail. If you do you just get 'our decision is final, don't contact us anymore'. Is that an acceptable way to threat a client who did 100s of 1000s of $ in adsense (which means Google did how much % of that running over my sites?) or more than that amount via adwords?
And Matt Cutts is also showing the real Google in that regard; he is always helping famous / connected people out, while the rest of us goes out of business because some vague Google automated fraud blah. This goes for SEO too (the HN incident for instance).
1) Tap a pool of willing people that would never be involved in AdSense. Perhaps non-technical, older people who have no inclination toward that sort of thing.
2) Buy their "google birth right" from them, that is, for a fixed fee up front and an annual bonus buy the right to spin up an LLC using their identity to do business with google.
3) Rent these LLCs to victims of google and their negligent bots. The money will come through the LLC, and there will need to be a percentage commission to cover the tax liability of the identity donor plus pay. Maybe minimal if you make the payments to the victim be an expense.
4) The renter/victim will need to make a deposit that is forfeit if they burn the LLC identity, to keep them from being reckless.
The cost involved won't help the casual user, but for people forced to make a life style change because their primary income was just destroyed, I'm sure this would work.
I offered to help diagnose the issue by going through server logs and anything else to no avail.
I guess when Google is making so much money from advertisers they rather just error on their side rather than spend time reviewing appeals.
Is there some kind of cap built into Adsense, or is it just a coincidence that the amount stayed the same.
BTW with this traffic level, is there a better ad network I could use?
They've been doing this for years, yet there has never been a blunt response from their users against this policy. Same with Paypal. So they keep doing it.
I'm not asking for a boicot, simply stand on your ground and demand a decent customer service experience, be convincing. Large corporations such as these ones, with so large benefit at the end of each year, need to understand that we're not sheep nor wallets with legs. We're people and we should be dealing with people, not with some heartless bot with cookie-cutter answers.
What kind of response would you get if you treated your users the same way on your startup? Think about it.
Once I started making money from it after 8 years of being under the $100 minimum payout, they disabled my account on the second payment. I received the same reply as the person in this story.
If you are an entrepreneur, think about disrupting this field. The competition, Adbrite and Chitika are far behind in relevance and payment.
Thankfully my site is now big enough to get into one of the more exclusive advertising networks that don't pay a pathetically small amount. But it disturbs me that I am banned from Adsense for life over $100 especially when I did nothing wrong.
They all require a large amount of unique visitors (1 million+ per month) and not controversial content like adult material or guns.
We applied for an account couple of years back and were declined. We went back and forth 3-4 times and they wouldn't tell us why we can't get in or what we need to fix. I have never used AdSense in my life, so it can't be the past history. We rank in top 1-5 results for all relevant keywords for our business. Was it the 302 redirect? Was it the old history of the domain name? Was it the IP address we were hosted at? Who knows!
Thank God, our business model was not based on advertising.
- "Please do not contact us again". - "Do not open any new accounts".
At the same time at least one of the competitors who is using dodgy practices (not disclosing full prices, listing VAT, etc) is happily advertising for last couple of years.
It's obnoxious to make Google six figures in profit in advertising, and have to go through message board proxies (that don't even work for Google) to get any attention to an issue.
I used AdSense for around five years total. I found you couldn't match it up with almost any form of social media content because a single slip of a single word (in any language) was enough to get you in trouble with their heavy handed censors.
pretty obviously if he had replied yes to any of those it would mean he had been able to find out what caused adsense to disable his account.
A little effort might have gone farther. Or who knows, maybe it would have had no effect.
Well, the original headline here seems to be a fear-mongering fabrication unrelated to the article.
One account was closed and the guy can't figure out why. In fact, this isn't even new information. Google closes suspicious AdSense accounts. Is there some conspiracy out there Google has a number generator choosing to ruin someone's revenue source at random?