adsenseclient

Hahaha. We have been through this with AdSense. Without the negative PR Google would have never replied. This is also a good lesson for the aspiring Play Store Android developers.

I am curious to know the proportion of GDP generated by publically vs privately owned companies in the US and how it has changed in the last 150 years

If you do not like an argument, factually refute it, rather than labelling its author. Otherwise your ad hominem style looks too much like Lenin's or Mao's

You must be joking. Any publically traded co these days is hardly family owned: the family members, in those rare example cases are by far the minority shareholders. Compare that with 100 years ago.

The main thriving product of the 21st century American economy is Stock of publicly traded US companies. The stock market is largely decoupled from economic reality. As long as the total market cap of all US companies is going up (which was the case in Q1), there is a "recovery". The settlement between this recovery and the real economic decline will only occur around 2040, when US dollar is debased and finally ceases to serve as the world reserve currency. Feel free to downvote.

We left them basically: see my handle post history. As a result, our company is left harboring very negative feelings to Google overall (be it acquisition talks down the road or another kind of future interaction)

Maybe, if you are either a $300/mo blog or you are the New York Times with a Tech section, where they could run a story on AdSense. If you are a $15,000/mo legitimate publisher - Good luck.

Hi Matt,

We are a large and an absolutely legitimate publisher, that have been pestered and taunted by AdSense since 2009. Look at the history of this handle: it was created out of spite of the treatment we were given by the AdSense team.

If there was no strong bias of INNOCENT publishers against TAUNTING and making conducting our business difficult by semi-anonymous AdSense threats from no-reply email addresses, this story would be irrelevant and simply not resonate, regardless of whether it's accurate or not. Look the the Google adsense support forums where you used to redirect your clients, and at PeggyK that acted as an unofficial Google representative there, when people were banned with no explanation. Who is PeggyK- it was the largest farce I have personally witnessed, running a decent size business.

You guys created an entrenched persistent opposition by the arrogant actions of your AdSense policy team and its Ireland office specifically. For now, it's not important due to the disproportionality between Google and its clients and a near-monopoly of AdSense for eCPMS over $1, and GOOG is comfortable with this small risk.

As a large publisher, we have witnessed both the $10,000 and $5,000 thresholds. It's simply true. We are now using other networks and directly working with advertisers, and our AdSense revenue is $4,500 (total ad revenue is $25,000+/mo). We also quite presciently considered making a PR stink after the first AdSense ban (we were re-instated later), but decided this could tarnish the image of our company and of our product for our clients- AdSense revenue was not important enough.

Even though after the initial ban (when we overshot $10,000/mo) we were OK'ed by a contact in their Policy Team and re-instated (a contact we found after a lot of work), EVERY time when we bounced back to $10,000 and then to $5,000 after scaling down, we would have new vague and inane threats from AdSense about our perfectly NORMAL UGC ,as if the initial conversation with their Policy has never taken place.

We basically migrated away from AdSense, but if their are ANY SERIOUS LAWYERS here interested in a class action, we have a WEALTH of DETAILED documentation. ANAL, but it's definitely interesting: we have never encountered such a SHITTY treatment by any other company, and we have about 1,500 corporate clients. Once again, we never did anything shady or different than some other publishers that are apparently Green-listed by Google.

Third world countries have third world police for a reason: out of necessity.

I wonder what you would say when you personally experience a $15,000/mo sudden AdSense account shutdown in a bootstrapped startup, with confiscation of $30,0000 earnings already on the account. The email will be just a template to accuse you of "fraudulent activity", and there will be no human at all that you can call. Speaking with the first hand knowledge of the matter.

That's not really horrible. Horrible is when AdSense shuts your account with $15k/mo revenue, confiscates $30k earnings already on the account, refuses to tell you why (a template response) and there is absolutely no human you can call and discuss this.

@raldi: could be also dependent on the number of payments per day. My knowledge is for the account with relatively small, but numerous payments.

Paypal is actually much better. When you reach about 10k/mo, they give you a special representative from the account management team, with a special phone number, and those guys are quite smart and easily available. First hand knowledge.

My question is: when you send emails like "it has come to our attention... fraudulent activity..." [1] [2] and confiscate $30,000+ earnings by shutting down long-standing AdSense accounts, will you do the same to the entire Gmail accounts, or just to the money transferring functionality?

One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585043

I think in the future (maybe 5 years from now), writing programs for Android will become like making money with AdSense now: unless you are very large (like Facebook), or have a PR department (like NYTimes), expect letters like you now get from AdSense: "It has come to our attention that <... blah blah ..> As a result, we have disabled your application in Google Play store and removed it from devices where it has been installed" And poof- all your work is gone! Replace <...bah blah...> with "copyright", "inappropriate user generated content", "not fitting our 'business model'", "inducing users to install it", etc.

The real question is, what will happen to Tinychat after Google hangouts?

This has nothing to do with over-representation. In our small company, we have several female employees, including programmers. We consider all applicants purely based on their merits, minus potential problems- fear of future litigation in this case.

The fact that we are afraid to post this on the company blog, etc is simply the evidence of the diversity circus, that will speeds up selling the competitive American industry to China.

In the USSR, Cuba and North Korea you could not publicly say many things, which made its economy less competitive.

Scared of her being litigious (e.g. if she has performance problems and gets fired (like any other employee in our company), she would accuse us of discrimination)- stuff like that.

I wrote "frank" because I frankly exposed the events that actually took place (receiving the resume, word counting in it, decision). What facts are you frank about? Would you like a resume where the word "men" appears 8 times? Or "whites"? Would you like to work with people who tout being white, Danilo Campos?

Let me be frank: I received a 1 page resume of a female computer scientist, where the word "women" was mentioned 8 times (organizations, etc). We did not interview that person, since frankly we were scared.

Somehow posts like this make me think this SF web media bubble will soon explode. I just do not quite understand how...

Right, but the wise thing to do is to set up the other ad networks before Google shuts you down. Then you can just re-allocate percentages. Setting them up, optimising, etc requires time, so the best is to have the mix ready in advance.

PG is absolutely right re: treating publishers as servers: this is NOT just about fraud, please take a look at this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803981

Posting from a throwaway handle, so that there is no way that Google would track me down.

Our company uses AdSense, and we have not been disabled so far. Our monthly revenues are much larger than Hatchling's. We have user-generated content. Despite our MOST extensive, multi-tier keyword-based content screening system, we are terrorized by Google weekly, from noreply address, that AdSense ads are disabled on this or that user's page, due to various violations found (often in the content in obscure languages, e.g. Hungarian , Finnish, Turkish), threatening to shut down the whole account. We are aware that the account can be shut down at any moment, and have been diversifying our ad revenue component for the last couple of years, using CasaleMedia, TribalFusion, Adbrite, taking conscious cuts in ad revenue compared to AdSense in exchange for security. Those companies actually care about your revenue.

DO NOT RELY on ADSENSE as a sole revenue provider for your startup! Do not! AdSense is only a good idea either if your revenue is negligible, or if you are a highly public high profile client like MySpace, where they KNOW that they cannot get away without serious negative PR.