Google AdSense Class Action Lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Google AdSense Class Action Lawsuit

hbsslaw.com

80 pointsgromy24 comments

Two notes:

First: This was bound to happen eventually - Google can't keep hiding behind the "we don't want to explain it to you because then others would exploit it" excuse for not reasoning out why they have cancelled an account. They just need better immediate fraud detection baked in (unfortunately a lot of unmitigated and spammy adsense accounts can be very lucrative in the short term).

Second: Good god it will be interesting to see who comes forth in this lawsuit. I have a few Adsense sites so I keep my ear to the ground in the forums. The people that whine about being shut down are most commonly 1) running some blatantly spammy sites or 2) won't show their site (so my assumption immediately jumps to them being spammy or doing something to game clicks (menu manipulation, adsense links that look like navigation, popups over ads, etc). Sure, there are exceptions, and I expect that will be the main plaintiff here, but it'll be interesting to see if any of the spam folks try to sneak in there.

I think this is an understatement, if it gets certified it should be fascinating :-). When Blekko crawls the web when we find hundreds or thousands of different web sites using the same AdSense ID its a pretty good sign that the content will not be useful.

Chuck, the problem--and IMO it's legit--is that Google allows you sign up, you earn some money and then for no explained reason you lose all of it as they close they your account. Now Google could screen all sites first (not likely) or pay the money earned till banning day. Sure it's written on the TOS, but doesn't seem fair and maybe it's illegal.

Oh I totally agree, there is an onus on them to be more transparent about what they are doing. The scale is what I find amazing. I don't doubt that clever spammers will sign up a couple of million AdSense accounts over a weekend, and try to pull some click fraud pennies out of them. It is just too tempting a target for "free" money. If you recall there was an event where Google would deposit a small amount of money in an account, and you had to verify the amount to "prove" you owned the account, and some smart chap started creating thousands of bank accounts and accounts and when the pennies got deposited withdrawing them and closing the accounts. I believe it was Brad Templeton who said "Give me a way to steal a penny over the Internet and I'll show you how to make money fast."

That is the challenge I see Google facing, on the one hand AdSense is a thing, on the other its prone to fraud.

The scale is what I find amazing....That is the challenge I see Google facing, on the one hand AdSense is a thing, on the other its prone to fraud.

I don't really feel sorry for Google at all. They are making $10 to $12 BILLION a year in profit, even after paying amazing salaries, benefits and spending money on a lot of unrelated stuff. So they can hire, 100, 100 or 10,000 new employees to screen better and to reduce false positives. Google is used to profiting from the web while having no responsibility (at least the new Google,) but now no one is buying their shtick. Soon or later the algo changes that shift traffic from other sites to Google and from small sites to larger sites (likely advertisers) will be scrutinized as well.

I use adsense and let me say sadly there isn't a better alternative to it, its simply the best paying ad network out there. However it is also the only business related service that puts me into constant state of stress.

Here is my comment reposted from an early discussion regarding the adsense that got flagged off the frontpage[1]:

I am not sure about the claims made on the post but there was something else that caught my eye a while back. I registered for Adsense when starting a side-project. I tried my best to follow all the requirements such as only 3 block of ads per page, no self clicking even if the ad was relevant to you etc. Since it was relatively new, it din't have much traffic. Then it started booming but it wasn't predictable by any manner, one day it would get featured on Reddit and then the traffic dies down, the next week it will another wave because it got featured in some popular blog, so on. However, despite the traffic being not predictable, the percentage of invalid clicks judged by Google remained the same. i.e. say your account shows up the earnings as $1200 but the check gets issued to you for around $1175, next month if you made $1500, your check will be for $1468. The reason Google claimed for this difference was the final audit that looks for invalid clicks right before a check gets issued. I thought it was crazy that I could easily predict what I would be actually getting instead of what is shown to be earned, moreover my super ability to predict invalid clicks. So I decided to keep a log of the difference for ~ a year, and what do you know, the difference in final audit was almost always the same percentage despite huge variations in traffic. I am happy to post the log but I will be breaking one of the adsense rules of revealing your earnings and thus risk losing my account. Anyways I am not bothered by it anymore, I just learned to write off the difference as expense and/or consider it as "protection money" that needs to paid. Too bad there aren't any good alternatives. Adsense is by far the best paying ad-network but if it had less shady tactics and better support I would have definitely put it on my recommendation list.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976

I really hope this comes to full light. I am an honest Adsense publisher since 2010 and got completely ripped off for $18,000. They waited until last day before payout as well, so all the traffic up until then for almost 2 full months was just gone. No answers from Google at all, just corporate firewall. They shouldn't be allowed to do this to so many people.

Context: http://pastebin.com/qh6Tta3h https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976

Welp, some lawyers are gonna get rich, the people who lost money will get a check for $2.

Justice.

Alternatively, Google keeps all the money it (allegedly) collected improperly, but hey at least no lawyers get rich.

Nah, Google refunds fraudulent ad money

I'm not saying anything about the merits of the suit. The complaint alleges that Google doesn't consistently refund the money.

Is this lawsuit related to the anonymous disclosures made last month by a supposedly ex-Google employee?

I haven't been cancelled, but Google and rip-off seem to go together for me. My CTR, CPC, and RPM would all mysteriously drop every time I raised a question or complaint. Earlier this year, after I was gaining traction with my complaints, my Google search impressions suddenly dropped by 80% in 2 days, and my revenue dropped from a high of over $1,200/mo in Q4 2013 to a rate of barely $300/mo now. I'm not a class member, but Google has no class at all.

Is there any precedent for ToS agreements not being allowed to be "one-sided" as Google AdSense's ToS is claimed to be in this lawsuit? Or more specifically, any previous cases regarding the legality of "We can close your account for any reason & keep your account's funds" clauses?

Deleted comment

I have never seen a refund personally or on any of my client's accounts, but they do reportedly refund any money associated with the closed accounts

I've had money put back into my account for fraudulent clicks semi-regularity. It's fairly insignificant but they do have some repay system.

A few things must be noted concerning this lawsuit:

1. This is the second class action attempt launched against Google by this trial-lawyer outfit: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/05/02/class-action-lawsuit...

2. This Steve Berman guy behind the suit was a Microsoft lawyer, it's notable becase another Microsoft lawyer tried and failed to sue Google on ad/antitrust grounds a few years back: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110901/14553415771/court...

3. Ultimately a judge would have to decide if this ever goes forward but reading the the two fillings for the two separate lawsuits, both are no more that just PR statements with news clippings.

The purpose here is likely an attempt at obtaining documents via discovery, doubtful it goes that far, it's an obvious money-grub scheme.

He wasn't just their trial lawyer though.

From Wikipedia:

Berman helped found his namesake firm in 1993. He was lead attorney in individual and class action cases against Enron, Washington Public Power Supply System, Purdue Pharma (over OxyContin), Exxon (with respect to the Exxon Valdez oil spill), Boeing, Intel (over alleged monopoly practices), Michael Milken, the Rio Tinto mining company (with respect to human rights violations and environmental destruction in New Guinea),[3] and VISA and MasterCard (in which he achieved a $3 billion settlement). He was also instrumental in the state attorneys general’s litigation against the Liggett Group and subsequent $216 billion settlement, against the tobacco industry, serving as special assistant to the various states. He was lead counsel for Microsoft during part of its defense against antitrust claims.[4]

A career of spray and pray lawsuits.

It's not really spray and pray if their firm is focused on this. They certainly seem accomplished.

> Our work includes representing consumers, municipalities and other groups in cases against unscrupulous corporations or individuals who attempt to subvert principles of fairness and equity in the quest for ill-gotten profits. We also work to protect the interests of intellectual property owners, whistleblowers and those seeking enforcement of human-rights laws.

>Hagens Berman was founded in 1993 by attorneys Carl Hagens and Steve Berman, with the goal of representing plaintiffs in class actions and multi-party, large-scale complex litigation. We have stayed true to that purpose and along the way have recovered billions of dollars for our clients, while winning the praise of judges and the accolades, and awards of our peers.

>> "This Steve Berman guy behind the suit was a Microsoft lawyer, it's notable becase another Microsoft lawyer tried and failed to sue Google on ad/antitrust grounds a few years back"

Even worst, he uses Microsoft Windows, making this a clear Microsoft smear against the angelic Google. :)

>>This is the second class action attempt launched against Google by this trial-lawyer outfit As if Google is any better than them.

Google will probably end up paying for the clicks not deemed individually fraudulent, TOS or not.

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