A stranger risked his life to save me from drowning in Costa Rica.
1,058 karma · joined March 12, 2011
Specifically:
* When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.
* The vast majority of businesses and agencies simply want to follow Google policies to the letter. Unfortunately the letter of policy is often ambiguous or unclear. When a policy violation is alleged, particularly against long standing and high dollar Ads accounts, there should be a presumption of innocence. Google should explain clearly and directly what is needed to remedy policy violations instead of playing security through obscurity and “guess what I want” games.
* At the end of our time as a Google partner, the automation had become unbearable. We spent 90% of our time resubmitting Ads and campaigns that were suspended or halted for no apparent or clear reason, analogous to advertisement “whack a mole”. Imagine literally any other outlet treating advertisers this way. For example, imagine Viacom suspending a nationwide ad campaign without a word of explanation. Imagine The New York Times pulling an ad without so much as a call or email. It’s patently absurd.
Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance.
We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded. In the end our client fired us and they went back to their old agency.
Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.
Of course, we could never speak to a human being at Google and explain this. One day, the truth about Google Ads (and Facebook) will come out, which is that it is all 85% fraud anyway. Save your money.
Today, we no longer do business with Google Ads or Facebook. Given these companies make up 95% of digital ad spending, it’s fair to say we are no longer a digital ad agency. We’ve adapted to market around big tech, whether they like it or not.
With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?
Better to rent properties for monetizing, insure your risks, and let others bear the big risks. I have a friend who owns timeshares and rents them on Airbnb, thereby avoiding most of these risks. Always look at what is possible in terms of risks. The worst will happen, it’s only a matter of time.
Yet I’m not what you’d describe as rich because of the asymmetry of risk vs rewards, and because of the drag of taxation. Outsized rewards are possibly only if you take outsized risks. When you have a big return, a large percentage of it is taken by the government. This is an additional hurdle over the risk you took. The result is that you take all the risk, and the government shares in the reward.
To break out to a level where you can support yourself and your family purely through requires a true outlier 10x-20x the average return. You can wait a long time, your entire life in fact, to have this kind of outlier.
I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life taking outsized risks and chasing the carrot so to speak. I’ve done well enough to maybe stop working in the next couple of years by age 45. My body kept the score of all the stress and my health paid a heavy price.
The time you have as a healthy person can never be replaced. The trick is to stop spending your time chasing dollars. Let other people take the big risks and get the big rewards, while you sit back and collect a tax of sorts.
The best way to do this is to own a business, which minimizes your tax liabilities, and also minimizes your time investment. This means you have to choose the business very carefully. It should be something that is very low risk, something which allows you to hire labor from the middle and bottom of the bell curve. It should have minimal regulation and licensure required to operate. Likely, it will be completely outside your high tech expertise. That’s good, that’s what you want. You’ll have to learn to operate this kind of business successfully.
By reducing your lifestyle, by not going into debt for anything, by not buying that big house, new car, new computer, etc, and by saving your income, you will be able to afford to buy an existing business like this in cash.
After you’ve mastered the operations and cash flow of one business, you can proceed to buy another.
The richest people I know, both in terms of net worth, but more importantly their time, operate in this fashion. My neighbor owns 38 McDonald’s franchises. He started with a laundromat.
The high tech gambit is a sucker’s game. I know, because I’m the sucker. The answer you are looking for is not “work harder”, or “go into management”. The answer is… stop working! Gradually your dependency on your working income until it’s gone.
Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.
I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day.
They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.
When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences.
Like, maybe not tracking your every movement, search, interest, thought, fear, and desire to turn you into clicks for money?
Or hey, maybe give you total control of the information they collect on you?
Nah, let’s turn the LED on and tout our commitment to privacy!
Former hedge fund manager here. This never gets mentioned, but there are fewer publicly traded companies than there were in the late 1980s. There’s more money and fewer opportunities for a hedge fund to differentiate, so it’s harder to get outsized returns without excessive risk. Meanwhile, the finance industry has convinced people it’s “impossible” to beat the index in the long run.
1. Congress on its own decided that 435 representatives was "enough" and ceased apportionment. Since then representation has diluted from approximately 100000:1 to 1000000:1.
2. We changed the way the Senate was elected, from a majority of each state's legislature, to a popular vote.
The result is that we have effectively created 2 Senates. Winning a majority vote of so many people requires massive funding. Hence, the profound corruption we live in today.
The Downtown Project was highly ambitious - area is just now starting to take off.
Nevada has SilverFlume for many years. Also, no income taxes. Also, no Employment Development Department. Also, real estate at $1/sqft. Also...