1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.
2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.
3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?
The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
Who is their true customer then?
What else did you think the Friedman doctrine meant?
“Nice app you got there. It would be a shame if your account got banned.”
Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.
It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.
If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
"This company is known for this kind of fraud" even though it isn't. But the paper says it is.
Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h...
Perfectly fine according to google.
It also tells me how primitive Google Ads are, when they keep showing me an ad I reported.
The frustrating thing is, this is very easy for AI to detect. Just feed the image into any AI and it will tell you it is deceptive.
Why wouldn't they? They still get paid for it, and if you could block an ad by reporting it, you'd just report every ad until there were no ads.
If it's small claims court the company has to pay a lawyer hourly to attend as their representative, while you just have to show up and pay the small court fee.
If it's big claims court, well, you always have the option to represent yourself, and then you'll probably lose, but at least you won't have spent much money.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
If I were the author if that article I would rest easy knowing that Google blew 5 figures on lawyers to recover $800 and enhance my journalism.
Google is fine attracting bots when it makes money for itself, but it can clearly detect that bot traffic when it has to pay out. There is likely huge amounts of money in total that Google has collected money from in ad buys but that they could also detect as bots. I would think class action lawyers would be all over this given the total amount of money involved.
Edit:
AI can be a great help here, ask it:
- How to prepare your case for your country.
- Where to file and how much it going to cost.
- Help you find weaknesses in your case and what you can do to fix those.
- Rewrite your text in proper legalese (I do recommend to prepare the your arguments yourself to avoid over generalization from an LLM).
Of course you need to verify because of hallucinations but showing up is half the battle here. Big (tech) corps + internal bureaucracy makes it quite expensive for fight these cases. Especially if there are many different countries.
That leaves Google with very few chances to fuck up before they're financially wiped out, and this is a ruling you can have issued in a small claims court.
Otherwise, I'm not sure why just being able to imagine a knock out David vs. Goliath win against Google has any value whatsoever as a viable legal strategy.
If you really want to know, you need to consult a lawyer, not ask here.
You read my wording wrong - you wouldn't force the judge, the judge forces Google.
EDIT: Ah, missed the follow up link at the end. No, he did not get any money.
Google appealed to a superior court (sending their lawyers this time) and the award was modified to $0.
So he didn't actually win, the online meme that "small claims are the one weird trick to beat the mega corps" doesn't usually hold up to scrutiny. I doubt throwing ChatGPT into the mix would have helped against their in-house counsel.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.
Governing Law; Venue.
All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense
Terms or the Services will be governed by California
law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules,
and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or
state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA,
and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction
in those courts.
And in smaller websites it's mostly Malware and health-related scams.
The reason you don't see these on every website is purely because the website owner decides to block some of those.