Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 158 posts

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#31

Post by nkozyra »

jeffbee wrote: post #19

I don't know if this is the case with techdirt, but by far the most common reason why sites and domains (for mail) end up getting flagged is because their resources have been hijacked by organized criminals and are being used for crime, unbeknownst to the people who own the domains. So if this ever happens to you your first instinct should be to question your own production security situation, not to assume that Goog…

Well let's entertain this possibility. It then seems very easy for Google to report why it disabled or why you were flagged.

Playing the guessing game is not helpful. In my experience, things just go dark and you get very little or no helpful messaging about resolving the problem.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#32

Post by reaperducer »

nkozyra wrote: post #29
reaperducer wrote: post #6

I think the more correct answer to "Why Are Currently No Ads on Techdirt?" is "Because we put all of our eggs in one basket." Don't build a single point of failure into your revenue stream. There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt's revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.

There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable. They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long. My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned.…

There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable.

Which is why I stated that they should be run secondary to AdSense. At least they'd be ready to go when Google decided to shut Techdirt down.

Something is better than nothing.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#33

Post by dathinab »

Isn't it funny that Google complains about clickbait while many of there sites/apps do exactly that and have gotten worse in the recent years.

Like in Gmail Google ads "pretend" to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails.

(Sure there is a small Ad label but it's indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject)

Similar things can be observed fruit custom page/domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#34

Post by nkozyra »

reaperducer wrote: post #32
nkozyra wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable. They all take a huge dive in RPM, are iffy with UX and security and tend to not last long. My personal account was locked out of Adsense in the same way years back. A violation every 5 months or so, which I always "corrected." Then one day it's just off. I respond and eventually Adsense is restored. Then a few weeks later, closed and banned.…

There are plenty of alternatives to Adsense but none of them are comparable. Which is why I stated that they should be run secondary to AdSense. At least they'd be ready to go when Google decided to shut Techdirt down. Something is better than nothing.

Have you done this? I've run remnant alternatives and quite honestly the RPMs almost make it pointless.

I'm talking $0.01 - $0.05 CPM when Adsense was averaging ~ $3

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#35

Post by mywittyname »

specialist wrote: post #18

Open markets require a fair and impartial judiciary. I really wish Congress' investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse. Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.

>Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.

Tort is very important for a functioning free market. The government just doesn't have the capability to police everyone, and civil court allows the people to police each other. Which exactly why large corporations move to eliminate their civil liability with users.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#36

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway_1299 wrote: post #15
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each pr…

[deleted]

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#38

Post by shajznnckfke »

nkozyra wrote: post #30
input_sh wrote: post #9

I play this game with Google every month or so when the webmaster console reports some mobile experience issues, but when I do a manual scan, there are no issues. So I mark them as resolved and then there are no issues for the next month or so.

As far as I know you can ignore those. Typically it's like "elements too close" or "font size too small to read." Then the next day it's fine.

Somewhere an instance of headless chrome is crashing and the thing trying to analyze your page on it is seeing every element located at (0,0).

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#40

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway_1299 wrote: post #15
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each pr…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN