Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

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I recently got a problem with my Adsense account.

- There is 0 absolutely 0 support. All you can do is go on their community forum where no one replies to you

- There is no alternative, there are other ad networks, but they require you to have a working Adsense account as a prerequisite. I was in one once, what they did was just put Google ads on my site and take an additional 10% cut

- Google takes an excessive cut. Officially they collect a 30% intermediary fee, but according to the DOJ lawsuit there are 15% that are somehow unaccounted for. So it seems the number is more around 45%

Google is a complete blackbox that pays no taxes thanks to a web of subsidiaries and loopholes and so there is only limited knowledge about their financials (although it is a public company), there is mounting evidence that they manipulate search queries/results in a way to increase their revenue and are siphoning more money than they should from their Adexchange. They also use anti-competitive practices to maintain their monopoly on web ads and the list of malpractices is too long to put it in writing here.

This company is an absolute nightmare and I am forced to use it for ads because they control the market.

The support they do offer just tries to get you to use features to increase your ad spend.

Also with the new VPN/Proxy they are coming out with the hide ip address you won't be able to block ip addresses of people who keep clicking your ad. I would track who signed up then block their ip from adwords so they would stop clicking the ad. Google plans to make millions providing a service to mix ip addresses and make blocking excessive ad clickers impossible.

> a complete blackbox that pays no taxes

Maybe you can look at a 10-K statement or an annual report before making obviously false statements like that.

This is the point where you back off and say, "oh, but they still don't pay enough."

"Information Asymmetries. Because Google’s ad tech products face little or no meaningful competition, Google has been able to operate its products within a black box, affording publishers and advertisers limited visibility into how, why, and even at what price, website advertising inventory is sold. One industry report suggests that approximately 15% of all digital advertising spend is simply unaccounted for, with publishers and advertisers unable to determine which intermediary may have siphoned this spend off for its own gain. Reduced transparency diminishes the ability of publishers and advertisers to make informed choices in selecting their ad tech products and hampers their ability (and rivals’ as well) to serve as a competitive constraint."

You can read the full lawsuit here: https://www.justice.gov/d9/case-documents/attachments/2023/0...

Too bad the DOJ attorney does not "grill" over that. Instead, quote the Reuters article

> Dahlquist asked Juda if they had introduced changes to ad sales in a way that raised the cost-per-click by a consumer that advertisers pay. "I believe that's fair," said Juda.

> But Wendy Waszmer, a lawyer for Google, asked Juda on Wednesday afternoon on if there were ways that his ads quality team could raise prices unilaterally. "No," Juda responded.

He said "no taxes." So that was wrong, wasn't it?

Man stay out of topics you don't understand, or at least don't make ignorant snarky comments.

"no taxes" here was obviously used in the sense of "not enough taxes". Also, reading a 10-K cannot answer whether a company has paid "enough" taxes.

The question of how much is enough is difficult, given how complicated international tax law is, and how legal != ethical/good for society. E.g. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/google-used-d....

"obviously" : I guess that has a secret meaning not available to normal humans.

Say what you actually mean, not some wild misstatement.

Edit: this is no different from clickbait. I could say "80% of women get raped in college" and get attention; then when it's called out say, "but it's still a big problem!"

Clickbait.

I'm with you. Half the time that I dismiss someone's statement as just hyperbole or a figure of speech, I later find out they were serious and seriously misinformed.

I'd say it's probably 50/50 odds someone saying "Google doesn't pay taxes" literally believes that the sum of Google's corporate income, employment, real estate, etc. tax payments around the world last year was less than their personal income, social security, and property tax payments.

It's also astounding how many people think a tax write-off of $1 million reduces corporate taxes by $1 million rather than reducing the taxable profits by $1 million. Granted, there are some really astounding tax loopholes out there, but a scary percentage of people think mega-corporations literally pay less than they do in total taxes.

It reminds me of the time I was joking around with a girl I was dating at the time about stress headache "brain muscle cramps". 5 minutes into joking around, I realized she thought "Your brain is a muscle, you need to exercise it" was literal, and concentrating hard would sometimes cause the "brain muscle" to cramp up. She was a grad student in Environmental Engineering at MIT at the time. That triggered a brief argument over whether the brain was primarily muscle tissue or primarily nerve tissue.

There are also a ton of people who think they aren't among those who don't pay any federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.

> There are also a ton of people who think they aren't among those who don't pay any federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.

(rephrased) There are a ton of people who think that they pay some federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.

Sorry, I'm not normally one to call out double negatives. My brain just does not want to make sense of the provided sentence. Did you mean despite or because in the context of the Social Security line item? I would have thought despite but that actually changes the meaning of the sentence.

People hear that 57% of households paid no federal income tax. They look at their own W-2s and see their combined Social Security tax and income tax withholding payments exceed their tax refund, and believe they've paid income tax.

There are quite a few people who believe they pay federal income tax who don't. They do pay some taxes that come out of every paycheck, but they don't (in net) pay federal income tax.

Did you try any alternatives to adsense? https://hostadvice.com/blog/monetization/ads/adsense-alterna...

The only viable alternative in my opinion is to do Self-Service Ads(Let advertisers directly buy the space on your site) or do affiliate marketing.

I am doing it right now, it is very time consuming, you have to go on calls, sign contracts, write invoices, find advertisers or affiliate opportunities, compare them against each other etc...

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