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Comment by fara | Hacker News Reader

I use AdMob for a mobile game I made. After successfully using it for years I got a notice that Google had bought the company and that my account would now be an AdSense account. I started earning money there and when I reached the 100usd amount, with no explanation at all I got banned. I filled up contact forms but not reason was given to me. They just said that I was not going to have my money since it was going to be refunded to advertisers. After a while, for some strange reason my account was luckily reverted to a classic AdMob account and now I'm back again getting my money through PayPal. I'm really disappointed on Google support on this matter, there are no email addresses or real people to talk to. Amazon and even DX have given me better customer support for 2usd items.

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> "They just said that I was not going to have my money since it was going to be refunded to advertisers."

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.

I work in an agency with several fortune 500 clients. Yes, I've seen ad spending refunds on several occurrences because of alleged fraud.

I had a very similar issue. I signed up for AdMob and right before I was payed out they banned my account for "click fraud". This was a legitimate app, no tricks to try and get people to click the ads. I just displayed an ad banner at the bottom of the Android app. I ended up just rolling my own custom in-house ad system and just cross-promote my other apps. I make more money from selling pro versions of my apps anyways.

Is that completely legal for them to do? I know nothing about ad business, but I would expect that if you provided service (shown ads) they should not be able to withhold your money without explanation. How is that different from refusing to pay for, say, rented car?

Your relationship with them is governed by a contract, which in turn is governed by contract law (probably California's but you have to look at the choice of law clause to be sure).

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.

There are solid differences between renting cars and serving ads.

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.

In my state (Missouri) Small Claims Court seems to work fairly well for these types of things. It does take a lot of time, so it probably isn't "worth" it in a purely monetary sense, but it is worth it to me in an ethical sense. It is fraud, pure and simple.

It isn't fraud. The legal requirements for such are subtle and numerous, but basically require knowledge and intent which are difficult to prove and unlikely in most or all of these scenarios.

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.

I'm not so much concerned that they may make a mistake and close a legitimate account. I think not paying for ads already served, and not responding to queries about it, is enough grounds to take them to court. If Google wants to respond and make an argument as to why they shouldn't be paying for the ads the publisher has served, then they would be free to do so- the problem is they have refused to do so, and I think it is perfectly legitimate for a a publisher to take them to small claims court and demand that explanation.

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.

"each side loses some as a result"

Side 1: advertisers, budget: millions

Side 2: small content providers, revenue: hundreds

There's no way that's balanced.

This is silly and incorrect. Some advertisers have budgets of millions, some tens or hundreds of dollars. Just like some content providers earn millions and others tens or hundreds.

I think the problem is due to their rules they can really ban you for anything. Maybe ad placement is in a spot where people can click it by accident often. Well those multiple clicks are now click fraud in the eyes of google.

It's definitely true that accounts above some threshold ($1000?) get extra scrutiny, not just from a adsense perspective but also from an seo perspective.

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.

From what I've read, they do a manual review at certain times right when payout is due. I've seen bank transfers for months on a certain day or within a day or two. But when I had a jump in earnings, it took 3-4 days longer.

That's a fairly common anti-fraud pattern for lots of systems: if a particular account's performance exceeds its long-term trend by a large amount (say 100% or more), it gets flagged for manual review. Once a payment goes out, it's not economic to retrieve it, so you want that extra review to happen before it's issued.

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.

You are the product, sorry to hear your story. I think situation would be better if there was a competition.

Wow, that's cliche (and wrong). Webhosts are not the product in this situation. This is a supplier-distributor relationship, where Google is the supplier (of ads) and you are the distributor (to end consumers).

No, I think OP has it right. The paying customers are the advertisers. Websites supply "inventory" of impressions. (That's certainly what Google calls it in my Doubleclick dashboard.) Google is a distributor, and they sometimes decide to cut off certain suppliers.

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