Comment by ambiate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ambiate | Hacker News Reader

I lost my Adsense account two years ago, due to valid violations. This saddened me, and was the end of web development for me. The stats were my heroine.

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.

I had a similar thing happen to me...to a point.

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.

Wow, so that's why my account got banned.

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. :)

So how do you tie in the account to a credit card or bank account?

Won't google detect the same name on the CC or bank account?

Names aren't exactly unique.

AdSense also requires a SSN so they can file a 1099 with the IRS.

Tax IDs and SSN numbers are.

Business tax ID solves that problem. Incorporate and you get one from the IRS.

AFAIK SSNs are not unique (1:1 in either respect) in the US.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/5969

business credit card...but I'd imagine, as long as the credit card # is different, the name itself shouldn't matter

I had this exact same thing happen. I wanted to try out some advertising so I put up in $20 and an ad for some shitty clickbank book. Of course it went nowhere so I deleted the whole campaign and left it at that. I went back to check out adwords a year later and my account was banned. I tried to appeal but they just told me that the anyone who ever had those urls as ads were banned and there was nothing they were going to do about it. Now that I'm going to get into Android development I'm think I'm going to try what you did, different address, VPN, etc. I'm moving in the summer so it won't be so hard.

When I was 12, I built apps to automate MMOs. I was making about $350/mo. from AdSense - not bad money for a kid my age - when my account was shut down on the last day of the billing cycle (ie., the day before they were going to send me a check).

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.

Major props for having that much business sense at such a young age! I was programming game tools at 13, but I gave them away.

entrepreneurship should be a mandatory high school course, along with media literacy and personal finance.

"There is a looming realization of Google controlling the majority of online advertising"

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.

Other advertising solutions for Android apps often pay more in my experience anyway, like Millennial Media, for example. I don't know why offhand, maybe there are fewer apps on them, so advertisers end up paying more for fewer slots. There's also AdWhirl and Mobclix which can act as mediators farming out your slots to other networks as needed. They are all just about as easy as AdMob to integrate, which is pretty straight forward, since most ad libraries are basically just dropping an extra WebView into an app somewhere.

I appreciate the gesture of expediting the appeal process from one of our members. The fact remains that I cannot participate in the AdSense conversion in May. When it comes to Google and money, I might as well be a pirate trespassing in royal seas, unless it is Wallet!

It motivates me to push my custom app that avoids some permissions breaking on Galaxy Notes and S2s, Thanks!

Sorry man, it makes me sad to hear about your store. Hope everything works out for you. Edit: hear about your story

Reply on news.ycombinator.com