31–40 of 137 posts
This one still stings, even though it was years ago. I built and ran a mobile sports news application, we amassed millions of users and were written up in several publications. One day our AdSense account was disabled, no warning, no nothing. We had never resorted to a single 'trick' or 'hack'. Nobody at Google could even tell us what exactly we were supposedly accused of. After months of escalation, the final word w…
Did you involve legal council?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All ad networks take money away from publishers all of the time. For example, it takes a while to compute the quality score of ad clicks and realize that a site's traffic is full of bots that click on ads and never buy anything. The publisher will see income that gets subtracted back out, sometimes a month or two later. The advertiser (presumably) gets a refund. It appears that Google did something different this tim…
Maybe they didn't return the money back to customers.
I worked in advertising and I saw how scared AdSense publishers constantly were of getting banned by Google. I understand that Google has to defend their business, but some times they were really harsh on things that were debatable grey areas. I always thought that Google was just needlessly giving itself a bad reputation as a business partner. $11M is about 1 hr of Google's revenue (365 x 24 x 11/100000 = 0.96) EDIT…
11 million is a joke really. I only lost about $250, but it pretty much killed off an otherwise promising potential startup.
That'll show em. I wonder if Google even had to move money from anywhere, or if it was fine to pay with profits from part of the day.
Back in the early 2000s I ran Google ads, back when they were only text and small boxes. You had to earn $100 to get a payout I think, and after forever I still had like $12. I forgot about it and eventually pulled the ads. In 2011 I sold the domain to some Irish company that gave me $10k USD for it. ... kinda regret it now. It looks like I have the same Google account (found the old e-mails for adsense on that domai…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
11 million is a joke really. I only lost about $250, but it pretty much killed off an otherwise promising potential startup.
Alternative reading: they did you a favor by showing you early on that they could kill your startup at a moments notice. That's a lot better than to have 25 people on the payroll and see your advertising contract go up in smoke (which happened to me).
I get the "We think your business is a scam and so we are terminating our relationship" but I don't understand why "... and we'll keep the money." doesn't result in criminal charges.
Coinhive works that way as well. I believe it is justified to call both a scam by themselves. Why? Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (innocent until proven guilty). The problem lies with our justice system though. If it were more efficient we'd have less things like self-censorship and self-moderation.
Seriously?
Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won't touch Google's Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don't think it's possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.
This one still stings, even though it was years ago. I built and ran a mobile sports news application, we amassed millions of users and were written up in several publications. One day our AdSense account was disabled, no warning, no nothing. We had never resorted to a single 'trick' or 'hack'. Nobody at Google could even tell us what exactly we were supposedly accused of. After months of escalation, the final word w…
Did you involve legal council?