Don’t Be Evil: How Google Screwed a Startup
blog.hatchlings.com
blog.hatchlings.com
Fast forward to Spring break of this year, I developed a few Android apps and one took off. I signed up for AdMob in early March.
I kept clean and got my fill of daily stats and was once again happy with my new home on the internet.
Fast forward a week and a half, I get an alert saying Admob accounts will be merged with Adsense, uh oh. I was generating decent income at this point, because let's face it, the Android market is just wide open.
I decided to make my second appeal to Adsense, 2 years later, asking for another chance and explaining my understanding of the previous violations. I noted my clean record on Admob and my apps as my reason for appealing.
6 hours later, my AdMob account is banned without any kind of notification. My wife looks over at me and wonders why I'm so sad at the laptop after 10 hours of class. It had become my daily habit to kiss my wife and check the AdMob stats. It's not actually about making money, it is something about watching the growth/lotto.
So, I have now given up on Android apps and just disabled all but the most popular one. I removed ads and cleaned up my last push.
I wish there was some type of leniency. My wife offered to make an account in her name and just take over my Android apps, but the initial thrill is gone. There is a looming realization of Google controlling the majority of online advertising and that one mistake will probably haunt me for many years/services to come.
It was with adwords...it was back when I was just getting started and I did affiliate marketing. I promoted this weight loss clickbank book...it didn't pan out, so I paused the ads.
My mistake...TWO YEARS later, I get a notice that they've shut down the account with bots because apparently that type of advertising is no longer allowed. So my old approval got tossed...and my account got perma banned over something that happened 2 years prior.
I filed an appeal, and that got ignored.
So I just said screw it, and created a new account. If Google won't play by its own damn rules, and will apply rules retroactively, I don't see why anyone should follow the rule about no duplicate accounts.
So I just signed up for adwords with a po box and did everything via VPN to avoid getting banned for duplicate account(matched via ip address). And it worked just fine.
That's the thing, all this bullshit that Google does...only hurts legitimate publishers.
The black hatters(who these rules are actually supposed to be for) only get a slight slap on the wrist...since all they have to do is just pay $5 to get a legitimate approved Adsense/Adwords account. Then just continue doing whatever they were doing before.
This EXACT same thing happened to me and I always wondered why. I hadn't used my account for years, everything was off. Then out of nowhere I get an e-mail from Google saying my accounts banned. I didn't care because I'm not doing any advertising anymore, but it's got to suck for anyone who may be making part of their living from from ad revenue.
The most annoying thing about what happened to me was that the campaigns were OFF and when I was using Google Adwords AFAIK you could not delete campaigns, just pause them, so what else could I have done to avoid this?
If you could delete them, it was not made clear how to at the time, I seem to remember starting new (slightly different) campaigns because I couldn't completely delete old ones.
Well, at least if I want to try to get my account opened again, I'll have some alternate options beside the appeal system. Thanks for sharing your work around. :)
Won't google detect the same name on the CC or bank account?
After some initial disappointment I changed to a subscription model, which increased my profit by an order of magnitude and incentivized me to work a lot harder on creating a quality product. Because of this, I don't regard my AdSense shutdown as a bad thing. Knowing nothing about the sort of apps you make, I'd encourage you to try to explore more options to monetize them. Clearly a number of people were using your apps. A different approach to monetization may be just as thrilling and rewarding.
entrepreneurship should be a mandatory high school course, along with media literacy and personal finance.
If you use another ppc provider on your page, you might get penalties affecting your ranks http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Similar with affiliate links, http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Even though that's worst case scenario and might be a bit tendentious; there's no clear way to interpret what you can or can't do, or how google might interpret it.
It motivates me to push my custom app that avoids some permissions breaking on Galaxy Notes and S2s, Thanks!
Maybe Google thinks they have to behave this way to scale. But my gut tells me they could get away with being a lot nicer and still scale. If so there is an opportunity for a competitor to move in here and surprise people with better customer service, as Zappos did in shoes.
It could help to have better fraud detection technology. The more accurately you can tell the innocent from the guilty, the less draconian you need to be with the innocent. And while it sounds unlike Google to have left room to do significantly better, the way they treat the innocent implies their technology may be insufficient.
I think the audience here is skewed. People here (pg included) are too wiling to see through their web site admin glasses and not think things through from the other perspectives.
It is not a given that Google's anti-customer service policy is the right one. There are other tremendously large multinational corporations who have friendly customer service relationships (e.g., Amazon and Apple) and aside from being the "right thing to do" it's working pretty darn well for them from a profit-and-loss perspective.
I don't care how you define "customer". If Google had confiscated 40K from any partner in circumstances resembling these, and refused contact with their partner despite having previously assigned them an account rep, I'd find this shady.
Like pg mentions, this is certainly an opening. Despite your protests, Google's partners don't like this. When partners don't like something, that's an opening for competitors. There are several other ad networks, some at least reputed not to employ such a destructive and passive aggressive customer service strategy.
The only problem is, Google has a near monopoly for search ads. Can you agree that near-monopoly power gives a company the power to adopt abusive policies? It's hard to tell whether Google really is forced to ignore partner emails or whether they are partly able to get away with it due to their market power.
It's not like companies purposely adopt terrible policies. Of course Google currently thinks this is the best trade-off. And this is now our bullhorn to say, no, we don't agree that this is the best trade-off. If we can't hold Google accountable to showing the faintest bit of decency to this partner in this circumstance--assuming the facts are correct as related--when can we complain about a company's policies?
Edit:
People aren't out to get Google. Please, stop with the "I know it's (suddenly, and frankly inexplicably, IMHO) fashionable to Hate teh Google around here", which is a fallacy closely related to ad hominem.
Apple and Amazon are the subject of repeated flames like this one? Please cite a few HN posts where this has come up. Nobody is against Google freezing problematic accounts. People are against arbitrary-seeming policies and poor customer service. Flames alone don't matter. The facts of each case do matter. And in the cases that have come across the transom here, the facts have more often been against Google.
Do you agree that it's in theory possible for a company handling fraud detection in online transactions to behave unethically? Because it almost sound like you're saying "fraud detection is hard, let's go shopping!" Just because a business engages in fraud detection of online transactions doesn't mean their policies are suddenly above reproach.
We are all well aware of the difficulty of detecting fraud in online transactions. This isn't new information. What's at dispute is whether Google is actually forced to treat people poorly during the course of handling online transactions. Most people say no. Ultimately, the government and/or competition will decide.
Really? You're citing Apple as a company that's friendlier and more approachable than Google? Is this the same Apple that routinely pulls apps from the app store without rhyme or reason? Is this the same Apple that approves an app quickly, but then takes much longer to approve updates to the same app? Or is this the same Apple that changes the terms of service to severely restrict certain forms of functionality (e.g. in-app purchases) just because that makes its own business model more attractive?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of Google's customer service either. It's extremely difficult to find an actual person to plead your case. It's even more difficult to get that person to overturn the decision the algorithm made. In some cases, it's not even clear that people have the power to overturn the algorithmic decision. But compared to Google's corporate attitude, Apple often seems out and out hostile towards developers using its services.
With Google, on the other hand, I only once tried contacting customer service because all the email disappeared from my Gmail inbox. I found out that there is no customer service. The only thing I found was a community moderated forum where someone marked my problem as a duplicate and referred me to a thread where dozens of other users were complaining about the same problem with no solution in sight.
When I had App Store review issues, they very politely tried to tell me what I could do to make the ramming less unpleasant. The experience was terrible, don't get me wrong, and they have completely lost what little confidence I, as a developer, had in them, but they were nice and responsive.
When my AdSense account was blocked, Google put me in an auto-reply loop, very curtly saying I had no recourse and that they would never give me any additional information. They didn't actually growl the word "criminal" at me, but it was implied.
Apple is absolutely friendlier, more approachable, and more reasonable than Google, and yes, that is really saying something about Google.
The folks that buys iOS Dev Licenses are the sharecroppers. Don't like massa's rules? Get off massa's field. Or go buy and plant your own.
Instead of, you know, just taking them hostage against their will.
That's why I'm in favor of government intervention in such cases -- to enforce them to obey some ground rules and not arbitrarily change the game every time.
Something like the antitrust laws.
Because the problem is that the platform owner had far more power than the individual developer or even any software company. Hmm, maybe a "union of mobile developers"?
Here's John Gruber himself taking Apple to task for an impersonal rejection: http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords
Here's Apple pulling an app that shows movie times, with no apparent explanation or contact with the developer: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/08/04/apple-pulls-box-office-from-a...
Here's the lead developer of Facebook's iPhone app (one of the most popular apps for the iPhone) taking Apple to task over their vague rejections and arbitrary guidelines: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-fac...
Finally, here's Apple rejecting an app because it mentioned the existence of Android: http://www.pcworld.com/article/188696/apple_bans_the_word_an...
So I do think it's fair to say that Apple is at least as bad (and probably worse) than Google when it comes to its attitude towards partners. At the very least, Google doesn't ban you from its service for mentioning Bing.
Criminals are smart, and it sucks. But this is the world we have to live in. Picking on one vendor in particular (and over a IMHO very questionable case) is just unfair and unhelpful.
I'm not saying Google is perfect. A few stories sound troubling. This one, for example, has a guy making a mistake, but listening to Google and doing what they say and being told that he's avoided trouble, and then having an account frozen. People do make mistakes. People sometimes do stupid things. We probably haven't heard on HN from anyone who outsourced their SEO to someone who was blackhat. (Are the blackhat SEO companies obvious? Would some naive website owner be able to make that kind of mistake?)
But yeah, fraud detection and prevention is unsolved, and would be worth a lot of money. (See also banks: You tell them that you're going abroad and give them a destination and a date. You go abroad. You use your card, and it's frozen. You make an international phone call to the same bank to have the card unfrozen.)
There's probably only a few false positives, most of the scammers they block are scammers. They can't afford to give everyone a fair hearing. But if you really believe you were unfairly blocked, they should give you some kind of channel to sort things out.
Allowing folks to charge for general customer service seems like creating a perverse incentive to create expensive problems in order to make money fixing them....
Look, this isn't "PayPal vs. regretsy" here. It's one company in a business area rife with (pseudo-)fraud trying to make a living and getting into a tussle with another company which is badly exposed to risks from the same fraud. Yawn.
It's not even necessarily false-positives that we're against either. Mistakes happen.
The real issue is that we've been doing everything possible for the last year to get this issue resolved and have been willfully ignored. We, a small 5 person startup, take care to provide personal support for our 3.5 million users (yes, even to the non-paying ones) and we don't think it's too much to ask for Google to do the same especially with an issue as big as this.
PS - the "spammy Facebook games companies" is a whole different issue. We try not to be spammy either and the FB platform is a similar situation where there are bad actors who tend to ruin it for everyone else.
Wait where is anything alleged to have been done by Hatchlings? Did you just make that up?
"yet you've jumped in on one side. Why?"
Because the issue appears one sided? {ignoring for the moment the many other people saying this is exactly how google operates).
"Look, this isn't "PayPal vs. regretsy" here. "
Funny it bore a striking resemblance. Web companies grow up and their shitty to nonexistent customer service doesn't go over so well when they decide to shutter a business account with significant balances.
"It's one company in a business area rife with (pseudo-)fraud trying to make a living and getting into a tussle with another company which is badly exposed to risks from the same fraud. Yawn."
There's lots of fraud in financial transactions and credit card issuers (banks) are exposed to this but if your bank suddenly closed up your account and never communicated with you I'll bet you wouldn't be yawning, you'd be screaming bloody murder.
The issue appears one-sided only because you're hearing just one side.
There's lots of fraud in financial transactions and credit card issuers (banks) are exposed to this but if your bank suddenly closed up your account and never communicated with you I'll bet you wouldn't be yawning, you'd be screaming bloody murder.
I agree. You would be screaming bloody murder. And that's exactly what Hatchlings is doing. However, I don't think commercial banks are too much better in this regard either. I mean, if a bank shuts down your merchant account and cancels transactions that are "in-flight" due to some kind of automated fraud detection trigger, would you have any more pull with them than Hatchlings has with Google? I suspect not. I think the only difference would be that you'd be getting these notices via telephone or USPS rather than e-mail.
This is exactly true and I'm perfectly willing to revisit my opinions if I hear the other side.
However (and a big one), I don't expect to hear anything from Google that's going to overturn the mental verdict I've formed that this is a lousy, shitty way to do business and treat your customers.
This is the bit that people seem to get most frustrated about. Banks have telephone numbers. Even if that support is outsourced to Mumbai you still get a person to talk to.
I must be missing something, please quote one thing that I said that you felt was flaming you.
The biggest problem is not the initial ban, but the total stonewalling from Google afterwards.
From my experience neither Yahoo or Google has the correct algorithms to prevent fraud. I know this because we have parked domains and I can tell when various parked domains get spidered and all the sudden we get a check in the mail for the revenue that bots must have created.
The reason google/yahoo don't do a better job is that the fraud clicks earn them money. But when they are alerted (by the advertiser) they come down hard and fast (as show by the OP)
Requires a separate login to that to vote or reply.
At first I thought you were potentially man in the middle.
While the whois says the domain is owned by "Paul Graham" at the appropriate address I don't separately even know if this information is correct as anyone can put anything in whois owner info.
My recommendation for developers who might have this issue on their own site is to set up a redirection script at all the non-canonical names. The redirection script should redirect to the canonical name and include the full path and query string if they exist.
I also take that opportunity to log the traffic so I can report on which names are generating traffic. That can help when you are deciding wether to allow names to lapse.
This is very expensive compared to an automated online system like google has.
But more importantly the local papers don't have the traffic necessary in order to make this a success. And people aren't doing searches on their local newspaper website for "plumber topeka kansas" they are doing it on google.
The local newspaper site doesn't have to be the only place where ads are shown, just like google.com isn't the only place where google ads are shown. Google has a large network, and newspapers could have a similar network. They had a great position 10 years ago, but I think it's still tenable now for some news organizations in many markets to be an information hub for that region, and some of that would/should involve becoming an information network, which includes an ad network.
Sites all over SE Michigan should have the option of running ads from an ad network managed by the Detroit Free Press, for example.
And while I did state that "feet on the street" are very expensive one thing that small business people definitely need is hand holding with respect to placing advertising. And I agree with what you are saying about assembling the network of sites.
The idea then would be to assembling a group of sites where the ads could run (similar to what google has done) and have the local sales force which knows the market offering the ad inventory.
Hard to believe this isn't being done already.
But... it's not that hard to believe it's not being done. This requires foresight and effort and some hard work that's outside the core competency of most media outlets. It requires a shift/pivot that most didn't see coming. Everyone wants the easy way out - just let google handle ours ads, and we get a check every month! Then one day you realize google controls a significant portion of your revenue, controls the relationships with the companies advertising on your site, and doesn't feel it needs you around anymore. Rude awakenings to be sure.
Additionally, most tech savvy people migrated to SV or NYC, leaving much of the rest of the country with less forward-thinking/visionary/tech-hungry people to drive this sort of thing. And if other papers aren't doing it, why should we? We might make a mistake!
There is a business model here to be developed, but it's also not one which is going to be a multibillion $ homerun overnight.
At the same time this sort of idea is being ignored by major papers/newsoutlets, larger companies like AOL were/are buzzing about "hyperlocal" and trying to get volunteers to write about local soccer games. Why? To have the content to drive hyper-local ads. At least, that was my understanding. But who's going to sell those ads? It should be newspapers, but they should be controlling local new media networks, instead of rolling over and playing dead (quite convincingly, imo).
That said, I don't really want it to be MS. I thought their ad/mgt tech was awful, but... with a bit of polish, removing references to MS, and some sales, they could make a dent in this market.
Our motivation to help was straightforward: we'd been partnering with hundreds of newspapers for decades. Their vitality - circulation, reach, revenue - directly effected same for our products. We had the resources and incentive to build and "give away" products and services to our partners as it was clearly in our interest.
Lessons learned included 1) even gratis is not sufficient positioning for adoption. "Gratis with guaranteed revenue generation" wasn't either: high-touch execution support and hand-holding through the process is what made it work where it did. 2) just because people are smart and capable of executing doesn't mean they will; if they were capable and still hadn't yet executed, they almost certainly would not without some fundamental shift.
Illogical, IMO, but those realizations have made other opportunities recognizable.
The majority of advertisers are familiar with Google's advertising platform as search users. Given a choice between an unknown startup and Google to advertise their own business they'll choose Google, hands-down.
You and other investors would have to throw tens of millions of dollars (ore more) at a startup in order to mount a serious challenge to Google's supremacy.
If you can beat them at search you can probably mount an attack on their advertising business. Without that it'll probably be very difficult to convince publishers and advertisers to switch sides.
Yes, an advertiser might want or have a business relation with Google for search advertisements. But for others? What does Google have there that makes them special?
Their brand might be worth something, but thinking this is unovercomable seems strange to me.
Would be nice if Facebook would offer Adsense.
Brands occupy a space in people's minds for various categories. Think of it as key-value coding for real-live categories.
Google occupies, no, owns, search and probably owns advertising in the eyes of a huge percentage of Internet users and business people. Everyone sees Google's ads on sites they visit. Naturally, when it comes time to think about advertising their own businesses they are likely to associate Google with this rather than the startup of the day. That's nearly impossible to buy.
Most of it is due to the fact that only a tiny portion of people are actually affected...and because these alternatives offer much lower quality of advertisers...and much lower earnings.
I'd love to see ideas in this space. I'd even collaborate with other hackers to build something along these lines if there was a clear vision of what success looks like.
Basically, Google's policies mean that if you don't like a website which uses AdSense for revenue, you can screw over the owner by sitting at their site and repeatedly clicking their ads. Google will see the "fraud", assume it was the site owner doing it, and shut down their account with little to no opportunity for appeal.
Fraud detection is just hard. And my expectation is that for every legitimate friendly fire instance there are six or ten "marginal fraudsters" trying to spin their troubles with Google via blog posts like the one in the link.
I clicked on this thinking it would be a clear case of Google doing something "evil", and had to read through very carefully before I figured out that it was just another account freeze. Meh. If it's seriously $40k, then sue them and figure out what really happened in discovery. That would be a blog post I'd want to read.
Using $40k of a service (ad space in this instance) and then refusing to return the service providers calls and emails for over 12 months may not be "evil" per se but it's certainly on the malevolent side.
If it ruined someone’s livelihood then I'd say it's getting to be in the locus of what could well be described as "evil".
For a company to do this without apology demonstrates a pretty serious ethical deficit (assuming we have the full story before us).
Look, I don't know anything about "hatchlings", I'm just saying I'm not going to believe a post like this prima facie. They look like a garden variety spammy facebook game to me. That's a market pretty well known for playing SEO games and gaming ad systems.
Are these guys guilty or not? No idea. Fight it out, get some evidence, and then come to the public for support.
But it would make it a heck of a lot easier to defend ourselves if Google had actually accused us of doing something wrong. To this day we're not even sure what we're alleged to have done to get our account banned.
I do not think it would be ethical to test it directly. But you don't have to search far to find people who have had their accounts crashed by angry exes.
Scripting that will only display the adsense advertisement once per IP visiting your site... yet guess what, Google disallows this practice!
A better solution is not to use cost-per-click in the first place, instead relying on metrics that are harder to game, like unique visitors and page views. These are arguably a better reflection of an advertising space's value even without taking click fraud into account. That's what Project Wonderful did, and it has worked out well for some of its users, but its model is also more long-tail/long-tail, which I think hurts its profitability.
Surely page views are as easy to imitate as clicks (possibly easier). Unique visitors would be reasonably easy to game as well I'd imagine.
Say I'm a fraudster with a thousand IPs and a well-anonymized browser. If I'm paid per click, I can easily turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate clicks, which, depending on how I play my cards, could net me a few hundred dollars.
By contrast, if I'm paid per unique visitor, I can turn that into a thousand apparently legitimate unique visitors, which will very optimistically pull in maybe $5 (judging by Project Wonderful).
Now, neither of those schemes are optimal, but just about any improvement you suggest for the unique visitor model will reap ten times the rewards applied to the per-click model.
Perfect. So it's your responsibility to prevent invalid clicks, even though pretty much any way you can think of to prevent them is explicitly forbidden by the TOS, but if someone does click your ads a bunch of times, let us know so we can steal all the money you've earned in the last month and shut you down.
It is time for those affected to unite behind a push to initiate Congressional action against Google (and possibly others) for these practice. They are highly destructive and unfair. These companies ARE huge monopolies. They just can't be allowed to behave this way.
I am the first one to raise my voice against more government incursions into our daily lives. However, there are cases where very few options remain on the table.
Unless Google, eBay, Paypal and others who are committing these kinds of acts on a daily basis change their tune in a hurry I think that a collision with government action is unavoidable.
A united front with government backing is probably the only viable option.
In the case of AdSense, if such a measure proves absolutely necessary, perhaps the remedy should be as simple as requiring those disabled accounts who prove they are a real life human to be able to communicate with a real life human at Google to discuss the evidence against their account.
Yet, here we are, 23 days later (interesting that you remembered) having the same discussion. This is happening with far greater frequency than publicly exposed. I've seen it first hand. You have to wonder what Google's trail of destruction might look like.
In the end these are families and businesses that are being affected in very signifiant ways. If one were to want to play the populist card, you could also say that jobs might be lost (or not created) when Google takes actions that damage or destroy company revenue streams.
Also agree that it is not a simple problem to solve. That said, if the problem is too big for Google to deal with it then maybe they should stick with search and bow out of the ad serving business.
A company as large as Google can't be compelled to make changes by one or a few individuals voicing their concerns. This is the fundamental problem. If they were good netizens they'd jump at the opportunity to fix the problem, no matter how difficult it might be. Hire another 100 engineers and figure it out.
The threat of a force greater than theirs might just be the only reason to compel a company as powerful as Google to make changes. That, perhaps, is my greater point.
I really don't want to see government regulate any of it. But I am not opposed to using government to force change or capitulation when few other options appear to be viable.
I suspect you will find that once you get to a scale similar to Google's, you'll find yourself making similar tradeoffs. You could probably be a little better, but I don't think it's possible to be both forgiving and resilient against fraudsters.
EDIT: On rereading, this sounded a little bit passive-aggressive, so I've rephrased it a bit. Hopefully it comes across more as an observation and less like an attack now.
I know their emails always say "we've refunded your money to the advertiser"...but has anyone seen proof of this? Any of you that advertise with Adwords Content...ever see a refund for any clicks?
Yes, all the time. Here's what it looks like in the billing summary:
The alt text for the question mark graphic: "Your account has been credited for invalid clicks that escaped automatic detection."
Yes
First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure.
New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place.
It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves.
During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical.
If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them.
One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem!
After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice.
If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action.
This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not.
This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site.
Once the revenue reaches zero ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice.
Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases.
Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it.
The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems.
Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin.
At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue.
Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%.
Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account.
I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem.
I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It's not fair.
One of my landing pages was mistakenly flagged as a bridge page. I suspended the campaign, tweaked the advertising in a way that (based on Google's own bridge page definition) should have been enough, and assumed the problem was resolved.
I decided to try something else, left the campaign stopped, and created a new one. The site for the new campaign was just my blog, so I didn't think it could create a problem. Suspended within an hour.
I learned from others who experienced the same problem that starting a campaign after one of your other campaigns is suspended without contacting Google will get your account suspended. It took an escalating campaign of contact across several Google and non-Google venues to get a response.
Some time later my account was reinstated. It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation and apology. Your proposed solution would have kept it from ever reaching the point of suspension.
It shouldn't take that much effort just to find out something you did was a problem. I couldn't stomach putting in the effort to create another campaign on AdWords after being unsuspended. Who knows what other trap I would fall into?
I have never encountered anyone at Google that is malicious and/or gleeful about this happening. The lack of response comes down to the fact that Google would rather make sure they get all bad actors and throw out some good than be more lenient and let some bad actors stay.
There are tens of thousands of AdSense spammers that try to take advantage of the system. 30-40% of impressions on Google Content Network ads (which run on AdSense) are complete junk. These impressions are via sites that take advantage of how easy it is to get in to make a quick buck before Google catches them.
The ecosystem perpetuates itself because Google's priority is to maximize overall reach in the market: the more people using AdSense, the more impressions they get and the more people cookie'd for behavioral data. There is little concern with banning people unjustifiably as they have a different priority.
Hatchlings did the right thing by diversifying and if you rely on AdSense, then you should to. Make sure you work with several networks (many pay better anyway) and look for other sources of revenue. This is what separates the sad stories from successes.
If that's indeed their attitude, then they deserve to burn long and hot over this shit. And nothing excuses a shutdown in communication, period.
The lesson (to me) is "don't rely on AdSense for any make/break percentage of your revenue."
My general attitude is the same, "Don't rely on Google for anything in which some kind of monetary relationship is involved." It's just not worth it - ever.
Being perceived as an unfair institution hurts you weather it's true or not.
(And NO, I'm not saying that I think Google is an unfair institution. Ugh.)
Edit: Amazon is also relevant due to their Android app store and soon in-app purchasing. I expect them to start an ad network for apps too.
I'm sure Amazon spends way more money in keeping their customers happy. They seem to realize this is good for repeat business.
They make it pretty hard to initiate what should be a completely hands-off (for them) error report too.
For example on Google Shopping they virtually always lie about the purchase price for goods that you find, then the top listed suppliers also lie about the price too. There's no [simple, visible or accessible] way to report either situation.
From Google's POV this should be an automated system. Once complaints breach n then check that the listed lowest price equals the "best" price of those listed by suppliers. If not then correct the lowest price returned for that query.
If complaints for a retailers price for a good breach m then scrape the on-page price (preferably using an anonymous IP) and compare with the retailers reported price on G Shopping. If there is a difference correct the difference, admonish the retailer and decrease the retailers reputation score. When reputation score is below x remove the retailer and send them a "naughty-naughty" letter.
Why the advertising standards/trading standards people aren't issuing massive fines to Google and their associates for false advertising in this way I'm not sure.
Then again, have you had more success interacting with Google when running ad campaigns?
I realize the diplomatic and empathic intent here but to me the whole episode is really damning if this is how they handle customers. Depriving people of payment for services rendered goes several steps beyond plain old shitty customer service.
Go ahead find a site with google ads start clicking the google ad over and over again until your IP is flagged (ads won't be displayed based on your IP). With in 30 days the sites ad-sense account will be disabled.
If it is, then it would be relatively simple to automate this behaviour from a range of IPs and disable the accounts of hundreds, if not thousands of ad-sense customers.
Some guys will setup a script to go to 5 sites (for example) and click ads on all of them. Their site will be one of the 5. All of the site owners make money, as do they, and because it's distributed across multiple sites, Google does not flag the activity as blatant click-fraud.
If you spend any time a BHW you will see these schemes over and over again, along with people claiming to make hundreds of dollars per day "on autopilot"....
I'm also curious how actually deploying to a rented/borrowed botnet is done - what's stopping the client from using a payload which nukes and replaces the controller with one of their own, stealing it from the owner?
I will say though, in every one of these cases there is always a little something odd. You never read about this happening without some small thing that was wonky about the setup. In this case there's a mention of the personal site without any details of what that is. I'd be curious to know what that was.
Even still, it sounds like a gross over-reaction.
The site referenced was a small content site I made to drive Amazon referrals for Guitar Hero 4 pre-orders. It was SEO'd and at the top of the search results for "Guitar Hero 4" at the time so it generated quite a bit in affiliate revenue but almost nothing in terms of Adsense.
They never told me what was wrong with it but if I had to make a guess it might have been flagged as a "Made for Adsense" site since it was pretty light on content. And as mentioned I removed the ads from it without as much as a rebuttal.
It was a no-brainer since it was so small-time compared to Hatchlings.
Something similar happened to me with Amazon. They kicked me off, never gave me a real reason, had automated responses, and now just ignore me. They also held $5000 for 3 months. I guess with 100% feedback and no complaints, they need to worry about me scamming them.
You never think that if you are following all the rules that something like this will happen to you, but it will. I now will not base any income off of third-parties.
It might be nice for some secondary income, but the risk is too high that they will destroy your revenue stream.
It's sick that so many people make these companies thousands and thousands of dollars/month and they can't even give them the common courtesy of a real person to talk to when problems like this arise.
The only reason they can get away with it is because they are a de facto monopoly.
The real shame is that it is more likely to scare off more legit accounts than fraudsters. People with fraud (or gaming the system) in mind are just going to keep creating accounts and collecting as fast as they can before it gets shut down... and then move on and do it again.
Then the user can at least say "Ops, busted!" or "Damn somebody is sabotaging my Adsense" and either do something to fix it or deactivate his/her account.
It's especially curious that no such notice was given considering that he was in pretty regular contact with an account representative.
I've been down these paths with Adsense, EPN, and others and I learned the hard way that affiliate programs and ad revenue can be booming one day and gone the next.
Now I only build PaaS and SaaS sites (not counting freelancing work on the side) and I'm a lot happier with a much more stable income from my web apps that is not dependent on the whims of anybody.
A third service layer would be IaaS; Infrastructure as a Service.
(Sorry, couldn't help that :-D)
He seems to have done all the right things:
1) Found an account manager. 2) Formed relationships with public google folks. 3) Opened discussions to further integration through continued sales.
Would you want to work for a company where you never got to meet or talk to your employer, you never knew for sure how much your paycheck would be, or exactly when it would be mailed/deposited? That's what we all do when we signup for Adsense.
Our beef here is not even necessarily with the false positive. The main problems here are that
a) We have never been accused of wrongdoing by Google. This makes it very hard to defend ourselves.
b) That it takes making a lot of noise in a very public manner to get any sort of response.
and c) That we had a working relationship with Google and a track record of working with our account manager to improve our ad placements, etc.
If there was a legitimate concern with our "traffic quality" why didn't someone at Google give me a call to talk about it and see what we could do to fix whatever issues there apparently were?
I sell a fairly complicated (120k+ lines of code) .NET application (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper) that manages the creation and hosting of websites by using the popular Apache, PHP, MySQL stack, and other apps. And I also provide support for it and the mentioned tech, the cost of which is included in the price of my software. And I've been doing this is some way or fashion since 2003.
For that, I was told, my site "had been flagged for unacceptable business practices", that is, as far as I could de-crypt the support conversation... Selling free items. A big WTF moment for me.
It's unlikely you can help me, but you can help others by white-listing the adwords/adsense customer service representatives’ email domains or IP blocks in Gmail... As both emails I received from them I found in my Gmail’s spam folder (pure luck on my part)!
I can’t think of how many people must get the silent treatment from Google due to this blunder.
It's a nice gesture, but... this could have been handled way before and from the messages in this thread it seems like a very common occurrence. As somebody who wanted to use your services in the future that thread totally changed my vision of Adsense and I am exploring other companies for ads.
We need you guys at Adsense to fix the problem after it happens, of course, but also beforehand because holding money for too long can kill a business.
Thanks
But the USA has another, well worn, route - class action lawsuits.
This seems ripe for class action, where the class is everyone who has been locked out of AdWords without reasonable explanation, or reasonable reason.
What is required is a lawyer/firm to assess the amount at stake and winnability, for them to get a representative case (this one is good) and to recruit thousands or tens of thousands of members of the class. The lawyers get a huge percentage of any damages, but the class members get rewarded too, and the main issue is the Google will take notice and change their behaviour.
In other countries we can use legislation to change the way Google operates. Check the jurisdiction of your contract with them - and use the appropriate system.
Well done!
I think we've found the problem...
[EDIT: original comment was: Looking at http://web.archive.org/web/20110203092609/http://guitarhero-... (via http://i.imgur.com/wWyNd.png), it appears that this "personal site" was a seedy affiliate site using a brand name without permission.
I think we've found the problem...]
"Please be assured that your Adsense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other Adsense ads."
The author of the blog post states after receiving that email he took the Adsense ads off. This was also in Feb. 2009 and the account was closed in April 2011.
Does the Adsense team (or whoever) go back and look at incidences from 2+ years in the past when looking for people to ban?
"Debby assures us on February 12 that “your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads.” This is the only issue that has ever been raised by Google in regard to our account."
Are you implying that the Google rep was incorrect and that this issue ultimately manifested itself two years later?
I honestly don't think that site had anything to do with the ban though as there was over 2 years in between those two incidents.
As the cliché goes: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade."
If this issue gets resolved in light of the publicity it's now getting, it just further shows that the Google system is deeply flawed for it's users.
They operate off the notion that pretty much everything is self-service and there are no requirements for human support. When Google Enterprise first started, their only offerings were M-F, don't call us, we'll call you support. It certainly clashed quite a bit with the traditional expectation of enterprise customers.
And look at their phone, which failed IMHO. One of the main reasons was the lack of customer service. Like a customer is gonna email you and wait 3 days for a reply when his phone doesn't work.
And now they are about to release a tablet? Good luck.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine with Google not supporting free products (although it is good customer service to do so). However, this bad behavior applies to products and support that customers pay for which IMO is unacceptable.
Deleted comment
It's almost worst than no support at all (because less equitable).
I do not know what to do about it, except for an internet arbitration organisation to exist that can negotiated between a user and a web site. Problem is, it would need to be voluntary and as we all know, these sites have so many users they couldn't care less about the odd user.
The reason: A risk to advertisers. I tried to contact Google but I received the same email the author did. I didn't care much, after all, it's $140. Why would Google care?
But $40K? That's quite serious.
I was considering doing an ad based project until I read this.
For $40k, I'd sure look into it.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...
> Despite Google's objections to what they perceived to be technical violations of their AdSense terms of service, they also had an entirely separate (but confusingly similar-sounding) program called AdSense for Domains, which handled the exact problem I was trying to solve--that of using advertising to profit from "parked," or unused, domain names, much like putting a billboard on a vacant lot. Though AdSense for Domains was closed to the public for years, Google did finally open it up December 11, 2008, just two days after my account was cancelled. Had it allowed my company to join in the first place, I would have had no reason to create my own billboard using "normal" AdSense since Google would have already taken care of it for me, and no violation would have occurred.
"If Google would've let me into their private club I wouldn't have had to trespass in it" probably didn't sit too well with the judge.
I tried to log back in a few times over the years, and after about 4 or 5 years I was told that they no longer had any record of my account.
I signed up again (using the same email and personal information) without a hitch. I have been receiving checks for many months now.
If they return to advertisers, would they suddenly see a drop in their budget spent, and number of clicks produced? For example, say I have an AdWords account and yesterday I owe Google $100 for 100 clicks, and today someone who had a balance from my ads got suspended, and they generated 2 clicks at $1 each. Does my bill go down to $98, and clicks to 98? If so, that's pretty weird.
Does anyone who has an AdWords account know?
search this HN thread for "in the billing summary" to find it.
Who's to blame in this story? The guys who based their business on something they had absolutely no control on, or the company using algorithms to protect its customers (the advertisers)? I am absolutely not defending Google here, but honestly, this has been said a thousand times, ffs, do not base your business on AdSense.
Better, the more people stop using AdSense, the easier it is gonna be for a competitor (your next startup?) to come, and the more chance we have to see a change coming from Google.
Keep working at it, you got something. The fact that they are even willing to screw you tells you so.
It's one thing to suspend an account and say "as of tomorrow, we dont want to do business with you and won't pay you for clicks going forward" - they don't have to provide a reason, they are a private company and can do whatever they want.
However, when you're seizing money, whether its hundreds of dollars or tens of thousands, there needs to be proof and an appeal process. Algorithmically closing down accounts and seizing cash just doesn't work. Plus, it seems like it'd be all to easy to get a competitors account shut down by running a bot and generating fake clicks on their site...
Unless Google never refunds to "the affected advertisers," there is no motive other than preferring algorithms to humans.
I moved my adwords campain for other business sites since then and advocate it when I can.
And Google isn't being indifferent here, there is well documented extreme hardship created by Google's choice to operate in the way they do. They know this and choose to continue their behavior. It appears as long as Google believes it is more profitable to act in this way they will continue to do so. I would imagine (based on their actions and words) if this behavior was to negatively impact their estimates of their profits then they would change.
Our company uses AdSense, and we have not been disabled so far. Our monthly revenues are much larger than Hatchling's. We have user-generated content. Despite our MOST extensive, multi-tier keyword-based content screening system, we are terrorized by Google weekly, from noreply address, that AdSense ads are disabled on this or that user's page, due to various violations found (often in the content in obscure languages, e.g. Hungarian , Finnish, Turkish), threatening to shut down the whole account. We are aware that the account can be shut down at any moment, and have been diversifying our ad revenue component for the last couple of years, using CasaleMedia, TribalFusion, Adbrite, taking conscious cuts in ad revenue compared to AdSense in exchange for security. Those companies actually care about your revenue.
DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! AdSense is only a good idea either if your revenue is negligible, or if you are a highly public high profile client like MySpace, where they KNOW that they cannot get away without serious negative PR.
This is really a classic business issue. There is always a tradeoff between putting all your eggs in one basket (say what zynga did with facebook initially) and having a diverse customer base. Same goes for relying on a single vendor or source.
Obviously if you can diversify it makes sense. But it all depends on the revenue hit your take by doing so. Extra money that you earn can be banked toward the future as well.
> Sorry, due to a security vulnerability this browser is not supported. You might like Google Chrome.
I actually hate Google Chrome, it's Internet Explorer 6 with a service pack. You don't support Opera? Seriously? For a long time Opera has been the most secure browser on the market, I don't know it's status in the last year. What security hole?
Our V2 that is coming out soon will definitely support Opera though.