Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

Two points:

1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.

2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.

The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.

While you make valid points, the major issue in question is Google's lack of customer service for the advertisement brokerage service they provide. Google may not have to "tell you a damn thing", but they should at least make themselves available to deny any requested information.

Google is the customer here. They happen to be a very big customer who is aggregating and organizing adspace inventory for thousands of their customers. But as with any such relationship, they are free to walk away at any time.

And yes it sucks; but there must be advertisers out there who think that a site that gets 10,000 impressions a day and is linked from most of the popular news sites is worth something; selling to them is a better move than whining about how Google doesn't love you anymore.

Speaking as an advertiser, I would love nothing more than to have 10,000 economically pinched nerds see a banner ad for my service, as I target the price sensitive consumer.

My strategy with advertising is more to say "hey, look at me, I exist" Once you know I exist, the price differences between my competitors and I give you enough reason to research me a bit more, and perhaps give me a try. So personally, I care more about cost per impression than cost per click.

Heh. this is the second time I've suggested 'project wonderful' - but as an advertiser it meets my needs exactly, except that it seems to be more popular with the webcomic set than the 'nerd news' set.

Well said. Further to the above, Google had a very good reason to drop this particular site: Over the span of a week, their impression count shot through the roof with the sort of traffic that never clicks ads.

So all Google sees is a whole ton of 0.0000001% clickthru impressions coming from a former backwater site. If my ads were serving there, I'd certainly want them pulled.

Granted, Google is terrible when it comes to situations like this. But technically they did the correct thing here.

So "technically" allowing a number of days to go by without response, not providing a method to escalate an issue, or not providing a method for users to get any straight forward answers about a particular situation that Google initiated is, as you said, correct?

Hmm... You seem to have ignored the first half of the sentence your responded to. The part that says "Google is really bad at customer service".

So no, to repeat: It was poorly communicated, but it's good for business, both for them and for their advertisers.

I thought advertisers were paying for clicks, not impressions? Why should the advertisers be upset if they are getting lots of free impressions?

If your answer has something to do with "it messes up their math" in terms of knowing how well an ad performs, all I can say is "that's a math problem".

I don't think #1 is as cut-and-dry as you're making it out to be. It depends on how you squint - you could just as easily say that you're selling it to the companies who are paying for the ads, and that both parties are hiring Google to mediate that relationship.

Point 1---true enough, but if I decide to drop BellSouth phone service, I'm still liable for any outstanding amounts I owe them. Why does Google get to walk away without paying what it owes the website owner who hosted the ads?

Which is where his entire opinion fails. Google may be purchasing ad space, but THEY are defining the price. They are also earning profit from my ad space. On top of that, apparently they can refuse payment for past money owed if they wish. It's ludicrous and there needs to be a way to communicate with our "customer" to get them to pay their "bill" (or, you know, reinstate an account we have with them).

One thing I would like to point out: Going from 100 hits a day to over 10,000 hits a day does NOT look like regular traffic. If anything, it looks more like bot activity than anything, which is definitely against the ToS, and would be plenty reason to shut down your account.

I'm not in the position to do so, but if I ran an advertisements, and suddenly saw 100x the regular users hitting the site, I'd be pulling the ads.

If you're paying by the click and the clicks are not fraudulent (and the amount of traffic says nothing about it being fraudulent or not) then there is no reason to pull the account if the traffic goes up.

Google's ad-insert can see the referrer field; they can confirm that the site is really linked from the originating site. With their toolbar and analytics data and giant AdSense network, they know better than anyone how much traffic an outlink from these sites sends.

So while they know the surge is different, they should also know exactly how it's different, and that it's not "bot activity". Holding back ads from all such ephemeral traffic would make sense -- and serving appropriate lower-value ads the most sense -- but banning the account does not.

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