Google News Growth Hack Exposed

This could be what we consider "cloaking" in the ad industry. Ads containing legitimate content are submitted, but when a user clicks it, a risk assessment is done based on the users information (ip/location/js enabled/saving cookies etc).

If it's determined that you're unlikely to be a crawler or a person affiliated with the host site (google employee in this case) you're served a "Blackhat" ad, which is generally worded much more aggressively and against the TOS. High risk users are redirected to "Whitehat" pages which follow the TOS and generally don't attempt to actually convert a user. These high risk users are considered dead clicks.

A few years ago this was an insanely profitable industry on Google Adsense, but they've cracked down a lot. The new major space for this type of advertising? Facebook.

This author needs to build his case before jumping to the conclusion, "And now, I hesitate to recommend it to anyone for any use." This was one article, on one day. It was clearly a scam, but it was one article. And if the Google complaint form is more focused on the publisher maybe that is because most of the problems submitted are from publishers.

The author needs to submit the complaint and move on.

This is nothing new. "Publishers" get in all the time with less than spectacular backgrounds. Google provides a method for reporting sources that shouldn't be there.

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/contact/report_iss...

Well that's certainly one weird old technique from a malicious advertiser.

"I bet they are the only publishers violating the guidelines" - should be "aren't"?

Isn't this just a very sparse interstitial in front of the article placed by the publisher?