In the end, it's would be a civil legal matter and probably not worth anybody's time for $100 coupled with the high chance of losing considering the terms of service agreed to.
Google has to do it's best to serve it's customers on both sides, those who display ads and those who pay for advertisers. Cheating exists, the mechanisms to mitigate that cheating aren't perfect, and each side loses some as a result. To claim that their imperfect anti-cheating mechanism is fraudulent is quite a stretch, and you'll be hard pressed to find a advertising facilitator which provides better customer service for such small sums of money.
Side 1: advertisers, budget: millions
Side 2: small content providers, revenue: hundreds
There's no way that's balanced.
So yeah, what I probably should have said is, "It smells of fraud, plain and simple". I am open to hearing Google's side of the story.
Without reading the contract it's impossible to say whether or not the reported conduct is in conformance with it, but if I had to bet, I'd bet it is.
Has anyone ever seen that their AdWords or any other Google-related ads spending got partially refunded?
I wonder how's this feasible given the delay between the ad spending and account asset freeze. This can take years if the freeze validation occurs close to an actual payout.
Is Google sending the amount back to my adwords-associated credit card or does it go as a budget for future ads?
I find it hard to understand how this kind of refunding works full scale to make sure all the account freezes will distribute the spending back to the advertisers.
In the long term, Google would be happy to replace the open web with Android or Google+. In the short term if you compete with Google images or other Google properties it is open season.
Ideally this would cause a delay in the payout, but if an account doesn't break the threshold until just before the payment date, the review might cause a delay.
This is common on ad platforms, credit card processors and even auction platforms like eBay. I would guess that it's a "standard practice" for risk mitigation.
AdWords and AdSense policies tell advertisers and publishers that advertiser spending on evicted publishers are refunded for the preceding 60 days. Because this policy has to do with revenue recognition, it's presumably under SOX control, so it would be difficult and very risky to willfully violate it.
So Google faces a larger cash loss if they cancel a publisher just after a payout than if they do so before. And they have no incentive to cancel publishers just to keep the money: they refund the advertisers, so they lose not only their share of the advertising spend, but they have to pay the publisher share of any unrecoverable previous payout out of their own pockets.
Disclosure: I used to work for Google.
I don't understand how 3 weeks before payout is not enough time to analyze the previous month's clicks/impressions for fraud.
Edit: To further clarify, we were expecting to receive a payment in the low five figures. Also, during that month I was invited to a special Google event where I spoke one on one with AdSense employees on how to optimize the site for revenue. Then two weeks later I received notice of our account suspension.
Going through the usual appeal process just returned automated messages, which also ended up in a dead end. So eventually we just moved on.
Funny enough, I was able to dig up an old blog post by the AdSense team with my photo: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/09/continuing-adsense-in-yo.... There's me holding up a big chalkboard, two weeks before getting banned off their platform. That was years ago, so I've since moved on but it was a good lesson learned.
PS: I was using AdSense from 2008 to 2013 - over 5 years so it's not like only new users got banned.
It's the current sad state of the online advertising market.
The fact that a large number of people have had five-figure payments forfeited under this agreement (sufficient to afford and warrant evaluating options like this), yet none of them have invalidated the contract in a courtroom thus far AFAIK, is pretty good evidence that there's nothing so unconscionable present that a court would void the contract.
I'm curious if it hasn't happened or if Google has simply settled them all to avoid having their contract challenged in court.
It doesn't matter how many lawyers they've got. For one thing, in most places in the West, if you're in a small claims court or the equivalent then professional lawyers probably won't be allowed. And if your case is large enough to be heard in full court, it's worth hiring your own lawyer, and they're going to drive a pretty obvious hole through any contract of adhesion where the terms are essentially "We can decide arbitrarily that you're in violation and thus refuse to hold up our end of the deal".
...none of them have invalidated the contract in a courtroom thus far AFAIK...
Are you familiar with the case of Aaron Greenspan?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bot...
The key facts as reported appear to be that he did take them to small claims court after they shut down his account and wouldn't explain why, and he won. They then appealed, and they won, but only after identifying two specific ways in which they considered one of his sites did violate their terms (at least one of which is explicitly identified in the wording they use today, though I don't know whether either or both was at the time) which is all he was asking for in the first place.
Net result: Google were probably out far more in time and money than he was, and got a healthy dose of bad press for their behaviour throughout. The lawyers might call it a win, but I bet neither the accountants nor the PR guys did.
I said that as evidence that their contracts are likely written to be enforceable.
> Are you familiar with the case of Aaron Greenspan?
To summarize, the contract was entirely enforceable and Mr. Greenspan suffered further losses to bring and defend on appeal a fruitless case. He also proved that Google is not willing to walk away from even small losses.
The answer to "if your AdSense account is terminated, who not just sue?" has little to do with plaintiff/defendant cost ratios, or who looks worse in the media. Most AdSense account holders are just trying to earn a living, not personally finance a negative PR campaign. Few have the resources or inclination for that kind of thing.
That's not a very fair summary. They didn't succeed in arguing that they could drop an account and keep the money without justifying it, which was the point here.
Mr. Greenspan suffered further losses to bring and defend on appeal a fruitless case.
His losses appear to have been about $40 of court fees and whatever he valued his time at, for a suit over about $700-800 in withheld revenues. Presumably the time was by far the more significant cost.
Isn't that rather the point he was trying to make, though? The whole case could have been avoided, saving everyone time and money, if Google had just answered a simple question in the first place. Fighting these cases, even if they win a Pyrrhic victory every time, is not a sustainable strategy.
I hope the person who lost $40,000 consulted an attorney as well, as that easily passes the "worth paying for an hour of one's time" threshold.
Any site that attracts a large number of fraudulent clicks is going to get their AdSense account banned. The site owner has no recourse if this happens to them: they agreed to it when they signed up in the first place - Google can drop them for whatever reason they feel like at any time.
Is it really that easy to put a gun to any random adsense user's head?
If you're lucky, you catch it, report it to Google & they just take the income away (as it should be). If you're unlucky, Google decides that you're trying to defraud them & their ad clients and kills your entire AdSense account for all the sites you have registered with them. A scorched earth policy being the best possible policy apparently.
If you get on the tor network, you should be able to find a few places where you can pay (for example) a $100 for 30,000 views/clicks from a random country in the world to hit a site.
I'd imagine 30,000 false adsense clicks would do it.
Once you receive a warning notice, your site enters the scopes of the policy enforcement team. When you make changes to your AdSense code, possibly other relevant code on your site, they send human reviewers to reevaluate your site.
I believe this because I received a warning for encouraging unintentional clicks.
I received this warning because in-content ad units had links blended to site link colors.
Additionally, I was aligning ad units with images.
After making these changes, the issue was resolved.
They never ceased serving ads, which was nice.
This occurred around the 7-8k monthly mark for those wondering.
After making these changes my revenue dropped about 1/4. This was disappointing.
A few weeks later I tried to revert to the in-content ad units with the blended link colors. I tried to use a light gray background color, literally one shade away from white, to distinguish the ad unit from content.
Within 30 minutes of making these changes, I received two new warnings,
one for encouraging unintentional clicks, and another for having content over ads.
This is because I had a hover drop down menu for navigation that dropped over ads in some parts.
I made the changes and ad serving has continued.
I make less now, but as someone who depends on AdSense income to provide for my family, I am happy to continue serving ads in the first place.
The reason there is no competition is because everybody else is scared shitless to open themselves up to publishers.
Click fraud is a thriving and sophisticated business, and nobody else (major) has had the chops to explore that black box.
I found my experience with AdSense enforcement to be fair, but the process is frightening.
I am excited that Facebook is experimenting with their ad network.
Competition is good for everybody.
I would not be surprised if yesterday's "leak" is indeed true.
Edit: I should add that I had been using Adsense since ~2006, when I was first banned. No big changes had been made to my website (one at the time), in the time before the ban. I never got an explanation other than the standard "illegal activity" message everyone seem to get.
At the time I didn't fight it, just said "OK, I'll just switch providers, please close my account." Google did actually pay me the rest of the money in my account.
But, since then, I've been disallowed from using AdSense on any new sites, Flash games or not, and, weirdly, been banned from Google Code too, so if I want to use a project on there I have to log out first.
I've since stopped using Google services, even learned about postfix & dovecot so I could host my own email. Never looked back.
Shame about the lack of viable alternatives to AdSense, though. I did use AdBrite for a while, though their ads were sleazy sometimes. Now they're gone.
I submitted a claim and they said: sorry, no - you're done.
There was zero reason to do it. No ToS violations, no fraudulent clicks. Just $30k less in my bank account for the next year. The second most frustrating part, aside from the loss of revenue, is that they won't tell you why or what caused the cancellation.
Edit 2: RIP AdSense account, ~2006-2012
I never show ads on the pages with UGC, and I used to point out that I wasn't technically in violation of the rules in my appeals. They then changed the rules to support their behavior of banning a site for content anywhere on it even if not on the same pages as the ads. I've since stopped showing AdSense on sites with UGC and I haven't been baned since.
Edit: I didn't vote in the poll but I just checked my email history and these came in on 11/7/2011, 5/15/2012, 10/29/2012, and 6/19/2013
Payments are usually issued to me around the 23rd or 24th of the month. So one ban within 4 days and 3 bans that weren't. However it was the most recent one and the only one within the past year, so perhaps this is a new occurrence.
When this happens, usually I get warning from adsense asking me to remove the objectionable content with in 48 hours. Sometimes, they block adsense on my website and email me about it. I promptly removed the content and reverted back. Adsense was restored on my website after a few days.
I get disabled, Google lets me know, I fix the issue, appeal, and get Adsense restored. My forums have Adsense incomes that range from $100/mo to $1800/mo.
Google has been great so far. It does feel precarious to have all my eggs in the Adsense basket, but the payout from other ad networks is abysmal in comparison.
Perhaps a more productive activity would be to post the reasons Google cited for ceasing the ad serving on your site and then explain what you changed.
Linking to your site would also be helpful.
In this way we can determine more reasonably whether they were right in suspending your account.
Surely it is not the number of accounts that were banned that is important but rather the reasons why they are banning them and the fairness of the review process.
I don't think Google is necessarily doing this on purpose, but I do think, as with most Google products, they don't utilize their resources properly to gather feedback from the publishers to identify exactly where the problems are and what is occurring in order to properly resolve them. Instead they see a fire internally and attempt to put it out which just pushes the problem to another area. Adwords, and in turn Adsense, are the bread and butter for Google earnings, and while I understand it is nearly impossible to handle every publisher issue they must receive, Google has a bad reputation when it comes to dealing with any problem at all. I do know that when your Adsense account reaches I believe $100 a week (not positive on the exact amount but that is what it was at one time) in earnings you do get direct email access to their support team, but even this is not enough in most cases.
It doesn't take long to do a quick Google search to see that these issues are not isolated to one or two users. It is a systematic problem that has been occurring for several years now. Some larger publishers have even identified specific IP addresses for click bots and reported them to Google, yet Google does nothing to ban these IP addresses causing more users to experience the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
Including Matt Cutts' response to the text in the pastebin:
Asking the ad department if they've been stealing money from thousands of publishers over the last several years? Of course they're going to deny, no matter the truth as confirming would essentially be an admission a very serious crime.
confirming would essentially be an admission a very serious crime.
Serious crime? It is actually a problem (there needs to be more competition in this space), but Google can tell any publisher to stuff it at any time. They don't need to have a reason. Now generally that doesn't make sense if they're making money on the relationship, but we know that in many cases they aren't -- that a lot of shady sites undermine the trust advertisers have in the platform.
A lot of people engage in click fraud. A lot of people completely break the advertising agreements (the ads that try to solicit accidental clicks, the apps and sites that implore you to click on ads to help support them, etc). These might seem fine in isolation -- Google makes lots of money and little guy just wants a bit of chump change -- but if it isn't controlled it seriously threatens the entire advertising model. One of the reasons Google has succeeded in a cutthroat industry is that they take measures to prevent and control this.
The people caught out will always claim innocence.
Google needs publishers. They aren't going to cut off their nose for a short-term gain. But for those scam sites and users, it is better to be rid of them.
For the sake of argument, I'll take a contrary position (I agree that the post smells like it belongs on snopes.com).
They haven't faced a risk of losing publishers yet. There are plenty of them. IF publishers called BS on Google and quit playing Adsense with them, then they may be forced to take care of the publishers they have. But as it stands, they can very well get away with using publishers until it's time to pay up, then dismissing them without explanation.
I faced this kind of stuff from them as an advertiser. One of my apps throws a red flag every time I advertise it- then I have to wait for human intervention to review, and always without explanation of what I need to fix.
This went on for years- I modify an ad, the ad is banned until review. Every time the ad was allowed, after review, because I am not doing anything immoral.
I implored them to give me the benefit of the doubt, after all these years, and spot-check if they need to. Hell, my grocery story lets me check out my own groceries with only occasional 'audits.'
But not Google. Not even after years.
Is there any reason why 4x more people would be banned within four days of a payout than any other part of the cycle?
(This presupposes the poll results can be trusted, which seems dubious at best. But if this survey is trustworthy, then I wonder what it implies.)
So either 2% of all HN readers have had their AdSense account banned, or the poll results are a bit noisy :)
(Obviously this is extremely rough math, but allowing for a huge error margin, 0.5% of HN readers would still seem too high, at least to me)
On saying that, AdSense is an enormous program
Actually, HN has grown exponentially since 2011. You'll have to extrapolate this chart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253773
Also, the traffic fluctuates depending on which part of the day you measure. There are comparatively few people here during 3AM - 7AM in the US.
I think it's also worth noting that it can be trivial to get an account banned if you just get a few people to keep clicking the same ads all day. So 'legitimate' bans could happen even when there was no foul play from the person showing the ads.
Now, as to whether or not their check is valid - that's the real question.
They sent me the link where the words were and gave me something like 4 days (or was it more? It was a pretty scary amount of time anyway).
I went to that url and didn't find anything, so I sent them a mail asking for more info. Never had a reply. Got banned.
I discovered later that it was in the english version of my website and I didn't think about changing the language to check the content there.
Can't remember how much money I lost, wasn't a huge amount.
ps: I just got a domain banned, my other domain were still bringing me money without any problem.
COMMENT SPAM: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. We understand that it may be challenging to monitor user-generated content on your site including comments, forum posts or compromised content. Nevertheless, to participate in AdSense you must ensure that pages containing your ad code comply with our program policies. More information about this policy can be found in our Help Center: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=13556....
How to resolve:
If you received a notification in regard to page content, please either remove the content from your site or remove ads from the violating pages. If you received a notification in regards to the way ads are implemented on your site, please make the necessary changes to your implementation. We will automatically review the site again after 72 hours. You do not need to contact us if you make changes. Please be aware that if changes are not made within the required time frame, ad serving will be disabled to the affected website listed above.
Additionally, please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites that you own.
I had the same problem with another site and I was scared to get in more troubles since I had another one banned. So I just disabled google ads on it.
Fortunately, there are many different ad networks for many different publishers. Reddit is using Adzerk ... maybe they will work for you. There's also a bunch of ad networks that specialize in different areas, including porn, gambling, etc -- stuff that Google won't ever touch. You may still be able to use AdSense if you segment where the ad is shown in places where you're less likely to have negative UGC, such as non-UGC portions of your site or forum topics that are more moderated.
Any publisher can do this on their own. They can sell their own ad space at a premium, and use an ad network throughout the rest of the site -- it's called "remnant" inventory. If someone writes profanity or uploads something for that page, them switch the ads off, or use a different ad network that will tolerate that. High traffic sites frequently use multiple ad networks to maximize revenue yield.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...
Banning an individual from a service without clear proof that they committed or colluded to do fraud or otherwise malicious behavior -should- be illegal. And when you ban that individual, you should be responsible to tell them why and be willing to defend yourself in court.
This would, I suspect, rather than cause a large amount of litigation, cause Google to reform from a banning mentality to a permissive one. There will be individuals who try to abuse it, the same way SEO does for Google Search, but Google could easily route around this issue if given a reason to do so.
I could say similar things about other services that employ automated banning/freezing that's way too aggressive with no recourse: Paypal is a good example. It's wrong, and needs to be fixed.
I disagree. It's Google's service, Google has a right to decide who gets to use the service. They are under no obligation to make their banning process transparent. It's not illegal to kick someone out of a store you own (unless you're systematically refusing to serve certain types of people), so the same should be true here.
Also, making the automated banning system transparent essentially teaches people how to circumvent the system. This is why games companies so jealously defend their anti-cheat systems, if word got out on how they worked they would be done for.
I do agree that it's unacceptable to withhold earned or paid money as a result of the ban. If you're an advertiser, you should get a refund, if you're a site/app administrator, you should be paid any non-fraudulent earnings up to the time of the ban.
Arbitrarily terminating an account immediately before the payout date - after services have already been rendered - without any recourse or information is not 'kicking someone out of a store you own', it's fraud. Plain and simple. Companies like Google and PayPal mistreat and defraud customers like this because they know they can get away with it - they're too huge and well-lawyered to ever get punished for breaking the law.
And the reasons for my ban could not have been flimsier. Since then it has even been admitted to me by adsense policy team members that it was basically a mistake, though not in those words, as they could never give me a concrete reason, so they blamed it on an older implantation of some of their code... An implementation that an adsense support rep had suggested I use just a few months prior.
Now, when I see Google ads, I click on a couple just to mess up their statistics. I really should write a browser extension that does it automatically.
One important issue that is also missing from this discussion is how Google refunds advertisers. I know I have heard from advertisers who got money back from click fraud.
They don't say so explicitly, but for some reason the signup process always ends in an endless loop or in a "stand by for review" message. I can't for the life of me figure out what the problem is and messages to support have - of course - gone unanswered.
I think the biggest frustration is having the account pulled with no explanation as to why. I assume it was click fraud, but it wasn't my doing - I generally just ignored the site. Was I clickbombed? Don't know. But it feels like Google punished me for something beyond my control.
One curious thing - I noticed in my analytics account that the site had gotten about 2x the usual traffic for the day before, so when I emailed my appeal I said maybe that had something to do with it. But a few days later (after the appeal was denied) I looked at analytics again and that traffic spike no longer existed. I wish I'd taken a screen shot the first time. (Or saved some server logs.) Didn't do either though, so oh well.
Still don't know what happened, but the experience definitely makes me bitter towards Google.
I believe the account was banned for a ToS violation that occurred 2 years prior. But I'll never know, just like I never got any of my data back.
Other than it being anonymous and open to anyone, the given options are still wide open to interpretation: Waiting until an account accumulates funds does give them a more complete picture to make judgments about the validity of the accrued funds. Also doesn't Google refund advertisers? then what's the motive here?
Google: "you delivered 30k worth of ads but I don't owe you anything because you broke the rules. I will not tell you which rules you broke or the URLs of the offending pages though, you will have to trust me"
They claimed I was gaming adsense for extra clicks, but I had actually gone significantly out of my way in order to follow all the adsense rules to the letter out of fear of being banned. I additionally told all friends and family who knew about my site to never click my ads even if they were interested in one (I told them just google the ad in a new tab).
I then found out that at the same time this happened to me, this happened to many other honest adsense users (being banned for what seemed to be no reason). I received my ban on Jul 10, 2012 for those who are curious (just looked it up in my email).
Lengthy previous discussion of it yesterday on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
Including Matt Cutts' response to the text in the pastebin:
By submitting an application to use the Services, if you are an individual, you represent that you are at least 18 years of age.
If you are 18 now I would try again. That they ignore requests from underage people is understandable, when their terms of service state that they are not allowed to join.
Did you not know this or did no one ever notify you of this? It seems that this phenomena does play a role in the online debate. People will say they've been banned and that they have no clue as to why, and that Google gave no reason or ignores their plight. Perhaps some of them did not read the terms of service too?
I see the same cognitive dissonance on SEO forums. People are most vocal when their site got hit with a manual penalty ("for no reason"). They'll ask why their SEO does not work as well, and then you see their sites and everything seems to violate a Webmaster Guideline.
It is not too nice to lose your payout days before you'll receive it. But it is also not too nice to steal money from Google and its advertisers with click fraud. I do not think that Google ONLY bans the fraudsters, never making any mistakes. But I also find it hard to believe that more than 50% of banned users are innocent. This tactic of killing accounts days before payout is to discourage the fraudsters and TOS-breakers, and I still think that is the majority of bans.
As for the reason why I was banned, I'm confident that one of my competitors was clicking my ads intentionally to get me banned.
A shame, but something I should have anticipated.
tl;dr: For what Google giveth, it may taketh away.
It seems unfair especially in my case when they give you the go ahead and you end up investing alot of time and effort only to have one person not like your site and completely disregard all the work you have put in. When the reason for disabling your account is exactly the same reason they encouraged you to create your site in the first place it makes it all that much more frustrating.
My sites were not small either, they had heavy daily usage and brought over 800k in overall advertising revenue in the last 2 and a half years.
Wouldn't this almost be equivalent to being terminated from a job without reason (and isn't that also subject to legal action)?
See "at will employment".
I don't believe AdSense actually has contracts with any of their publishers but even that wouldn't make it illegal, just easier for the publisher to win a lawsuit.
You can sue for any reason including this but it's expensive and unlikely to succeed because Google can pretty much out-lawyer anyone. The case would probably get thrown out immediately.
So I believe it. I know other webmasters that had the exact same thing happen to them too.
This is not some outlandish freak occurrence it happens all the time.
At least I'm never ever going to use AdSense again.
That was more than ten years ago.
Why not paying out expected clicks according to a forecast based on click data prior to the alleged fraud?
That should be a fair compromise IMO
Had one account that used to do 15k a month which never got banned. Lucky me! Made about 150k before that site was sold.
Had an account that was rapidly growing and was doing near $1k per day when it got banned. Site started exploding and within 2 weeks we had gone from $40 a day to $700+. Cycle ended and was banned.
I never violated the TOS on any of my accounts. Never bought traffic or clicked my own ads. If you have half a brain you'd realize its pointless unless you're trying to make a few dollars per day if you're gonna click them yourself.
Never fuck up with my money.