Banned From Making Money, These YouTubers Share Their Stories
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
For anyone considering anything resembling a professional relationship with Google (i.e. you are relying on them for income), make absolutely sure that you have real alternatives that you can move to if/when they screw you. You might think "I'm totally above board here, and have no intention of violating their TOS, so I won't ever have a problem", and you would be wrong. It isn't under your control, so you need to make sure you have a backup plan.
In fact, ideally you need to already have non-Google sources of revenue, so that if Google drops you, you aren't left high and dry until you can switch to something else.
Does your revenue depend entirely on being in Apple's good graces, and being dropped from the App Store would end it? Does it depend solely on Google's advertising money? Or even if not solely, if 75% of your revenue comes from one source, it will be game changing if you lose that.
This is why monopolies are a bad idea, and duopolies aren't much better. A healthy market will have at least three viable players, with none controlling over 50% of the market, allowing you to diversify and be save from any one of them deciding not to play.
The networking effect is naturally monopolistic.
There aren't any practical alternatives to facebook and youtube. Being kicked from either would be disastrous and neither has to offer an alternate ad network or even need a good reason to get rid of you.
I imagine a simple mediation or ombudsman process is all these companies need, but they have no incentive to really make that work. They're still making money hand over fist.
From a regulator perspective, these are major issues, especially since we've officially entered the age of the walled garden/centralized store. I don't think this is the kind of thing the free market will magically be able to fix if we sit and our hands and wait. I imagine its going to get worse once MS and other big players start making it much more difficult or impossible to install unsigned software or software from outside their store.
If your income is from one source, you should default to saving more of it than you would if you had a diversified income base.
There aren't much, if any, advertising providers with ads as accepted and unintrusive as Googles AdSense...
Not to forget their huge portfolio of ads that will fit almost every context - so yes, AdSense is the go-to provider for most.
That way even if your videos are deleted you can stick them up somewhere else and link from your site and hopefully at least some of your followers will have bookmarked it.
When I was 14 I made a flash games/funny videos website, and used AdSense as my only income. I learnt a lot about driving traffic and things just started to pick up - and then I was banned.
It later came to my attention that a few friends and (at the time) girlfriend had taken it upon themselves to 'help' me by clicking an ad once a day. Annoying, since I was making about $10 a day from ads. I didn't need help. $10 a day was great for a 14 year old.
That was nearly eight years ago. I recently contacted Google about it, and was completely ignored. I understand why, it makes sense for them to protect their business - but it's annoying none the less. I could think of good uses for AdSense right now.
My point is more that it's interesting how easy it is to use this as a DDOS type tactic and it's a shame they don't have better appeal system in place. These days I am sure I could contribute to the AdSense ecosystem in a substantially more positive way.
If not it would be a great way to sabotage somebody you didn't like.
Overzealous fans going on click-fests are a problem for Google's customers (the advertisers). Automatically banning that account and showing those ads elsewhere completely solves that problem. Simple load-balancing at work. What more do they need to do?
Its a sad way to treat the content producers. From the big picture however the 'bad actors' figured out that there was a 'hole' in the AdSense cover which you could pull millions out of, it was create a bunch of AdSense accounts in a bunch of accounts and distribute clicks through them. Reasonably easy to automate and provided a good return on the investment.
So independent video producer with a modest stream? Or part of a clickfraud ring? Hard to tell apart. But the customers really hate seeing a bunch of clicks that don't result in any conversions.
The solution will end up with advertisers paying less per click (we're already seeing that in Google's reports) and/or switching to a per-impression model, or on the outside chance a flat fee over time model which is analogous to the magazine model.
Would you want me to be able to shut down your business with a relatively simple action for me to take, without you being able to take any recourse, without you even having any relationship with me? It has terrible externalities with seemingly innocent actors, imagine what could be achieved with a bit of malice, as you will find among competitors.
It really hasn't cost them anything so they haven't spent anything trying to fix it.
Competitors can just kill each other's revenue sources.
But, I'm guessing the really big channels will get protection from that, while the small guys would get banned.
Remember, in this case, Google is the customer and the content provider is the vendor. Google has decided not to be those vendor's customer anymore.
That's one of Google's primary problems and it will only get worse with popularity - they need better CS.
If it's an honest misunderstanding: no harm done. If it's a money-making scheme: they'll give up and go elsewhere, guaranteed.
How would one find the others? Well... http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117 might work for creating one's own community.
Sometimes, the best way to show a structure's flaws is to bring down the structure by abusing those flaws.
Even at that rate, youtube/google implemented an automated success rate of 99.9999%. Let's get some articles about how they accomplished that. That'd be more interesting than this sensationalist drivel.
If there is ever a case worthy of using company resources, it's for activities that directly affect its bottom line. Google seems to have bad support for both AdSense and AdWords and it's not because they don't have the resources, it's because they so far have not had to. Competition is what will solve Google's people problem.
I have generated Google a lot of revenue through AdSense over the years and I still live in fear of being cut off and not having any recourse. Yes, I have other revenue streams, but it would be a huge loss that's hard to fill. With any other company I would be confident that they would want the [significant] revenue and would at least work with me, but not Google.
If not for Google, you may not have a dime of that money you've earned. I mean, maybe not, right? If so, then you'd have to have gotten that money through someone else doing what Google is doing right? Why not just switch to them if Google does you dirty?
The underlying point here is that you are not Google's customer -- the advertiser is -- and it's in your, Google's, and the advertiser's best interest to treat the advertiser better than they treat you. Otherwise, the customer is going to go to another network that doesn't let fraudsters game them out of click fees.
How many articles have we seen about Facebook doing exactly that? That's much worse IMO. If I'm giving you money, you better be taking it legitimately. If I'm taking your money, the onus is on me to prove I have taken it honestly. If not, I'd totally expect Google to keep the money -- and they don't keep the money -- they give it back to the advertiser or never charge them to begin with.
If you or the other people around here were to keep the money an advertiser gave you and then complained about being fraudulent -- even if it wasn't -- then you'd soon be faced with tons of articles saying "They kept my money even though bots were clicking!!"
And you'd soon be out of business because no one would give you any money.
Google is making the right decisions here. Face it.
> If not for Google, you may not have a dime of that money you've earned. I mean, maybe not, right? If so, then you'd have to have gotten that money through someone else doing what Google is doing right? Why not just switch to them if Google does you dirty?
And likewise, Google wouldn't have had their cut for that money either. As best as I can tell it's a mutually beneficial relationship, but Google's lack of transparency does shift the balance (while I can yank all my inventory, that only works going forwards, Google can unilaterally decide to not pay you for what they have already taken).
> How many articles have we seen about Facebook doing exactly that? That's much worse IMO. If I'm giving you money, you better be taking it legitimately. If I'm taking your money, the onus is on me to prove I have taken it honestly. If not, I'd totally expect Google to keep the money -- and they don't keep the money -- they give it back to the advertiser or never charge them to begin with.
All of the tools, methods and results of legitimacy are stacked on Google's side and are kept completely secret. If their secret sauce decides to boot you, they don't even let you know what happened, which is especially rich. The same applies to AdWords, Google hosts an auction but keeps everyone in the dark and asks for their trust. Advertisers don't have any say in click fraud either, it's all left to the secret black box.
It's a pretty ridiculous thing on its face. Imagine an employeer takes you into the conference room in the middle of the month and states that they're not happy with something (but won't say what) and that they're going to have to take your past three pay checks and send you on your way. Frustrating to say the least.
AdSense is great, but not perfect.
Everyone knows. It's boring. Get over it. It's exactly the way it is supposed to be and there is no better way. All the proposals to get a human involved slow everything down and Google would never have gotten to where they are if they had people wasting their time on every case that cried about being an exception to the rule -- especially since even those who cry about being the exception really aren't the exception.
It's a waste of time and these blog posts are a waste of time and here I am wasting more time.
There is a better way, but it's against Google's ethos to not use engineering to solve a problem. That itself is the problem this thread is speaking to. Algorithms are great, except when they're not. Most companies have a way to deal with that, but Google makes it a point of pride to not.
Other fraud systems are not completely controlled by an algorithm. Imagine if Visa banned you from ever being able to accept Visa without an appeals process or even providing any information about what you did wrong? If Visa detects a pattern of fraud they open an investigation and the merchant is a part of this process. It's slow and expensive, but also necessary and has not prevented credit card companies to operate at huge scale.
The advertisers are the customers and customers want to know they are paying for clicks from valid opportunities. Google is handling the customer appropriately by banning those that are committing fraud. If you're my sales guy and you defraud my customers I'm going to fire you too.
> "It is not possible to directly contact Google," he said. "No one will speak with you, and there are no other avenues unless you are friends with someone who works there. Once your appeal is rejected, they will not reply to your emails or speak with you further on the issue (they actually tell you that in the rejection letter). It is essentially a LIFETIME ban for your account. Seems fair, right?"
His account was reinstated due to the press coverage, just as many HNers get their accounts back due to the many Googlers who frequent here.
That's not what I would define as customer service.
It's totally irrational, sensationalist, click bait.
If they notice apparent click-fraud, they should suspend payments and notify the account holders. If the fraud continues (either this one issue or if it repeats regularly)[1], shut them down.
Like it or not, Google (and others like eBay) have put themselves in the position of supplying people's livelihood. There needs to be more respect for that fact. They've shown that they believe their algorithms can be wrong by reinstating people's accounts when stupid crap like this hits, but I contend that is not good enough. Crap like this should just not be hitting.
They can have automated systems and reasonable algorithms at the same time.
1. Some will probably say this gives fraudsters more chances to learn Google's algorithms. How hard is it to create a new account?
Even if it's 99% finding a person to employ who would make fewer mistakes would be a stellar employee -- good luck. Even if you could, at that scale there'd be a tiny fraction of people who actually made money.
How many of the cases of "OMG, Google is shutting me down!" have legitimate grievances? Maybe a tiny fraction? How many of those are "worth" investigating? Even smaller fraction. Heck, those complainers on that guy's blog could have been making $4 a month, who knows. All this has been a complete waste of time. Let's talk about something important.
I'm usually not one to defend Google, but in this case, they are behaving exactly perfectly.
Get back to work.
The only way to get unbanned is to get noticed by a human at Google - through a non-Google channel, because Google channels are specifically designed never to bother humans.
This is not really true; Google does answer customer support queries for products that have customer support. Google Wallet and Google Apps are two products with dedicated 24/7 phone support.
Content providers are not the customer. Google is the customer and the content provider is the vendor. Google can make whatever decisions Google wants to make about who they give money too.
If a customer decides to stop being your customer -- for whatever reason -- they are entirely entitled to do that and you are not entitled to their money.
http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/
The tough part is balancing the needs of all users: content creators, advertisers, and viewers.
my adsense account still shows hundreds of dollars to pay out that they wont. sadly no other easy to launch-with ad tool (e.g. yahoo) for a regular home user with a site can yield much money. they really have a monopoly, and this behavior just screws people.
in this scenario, fuck google.
These stories are not new and seem to be adding up. I'm still confused why they haven't invested in a call center or some type of dedicated customer service for the products they support.
It makes absolutely no sense to me.
you, as the small person showing ads, are so insignificant that they wont listen to these complaints.