31–40 of 168 posts
I've not confirmed this at all but interesting it's a lead topic here... http://pastebin.com/qh6Tta3h
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
Including Matt Cutts' response to the text in the pastebin:
It's been an hour, and a very clear trend is emerging: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bar+graph+13%2C+5%2C+10... Is there any reason why 4x more people would be banned within four days of a payout than any other part of the cycle? (This presupposes the poll results can be trusted, which seems dubious at best. But if this survey is trustworthy, then I wonder what it implies.)
I use AdMob for a mobile game I made. After successfully using it for years I got a notice that Google had bought the company and that my account would now be an AdSense account. I started earning money there and when I reached the 100usd amount, with no explanation at all I got banned. I filled up contact forms but not reason was given to me. They just said that I was not going to have my money since it was going to…
In the long term, Google would be happy to replace the open web with Android or Google+. In the short term if you compete with Google images or other Google properties it is open season.
I find it hard to believe that a multibillion dollar company is plotting to steal hundreds of dollars from publishers. Perhaps a more productive activity would be to post the reasons Google cited for ceasing the ad serving on your site and then explain what you changed. Linking to your site would also be helpful. In this way we can determine more reasonably whether they were right in suspending your account. Surely i…
Maybe they're not plotting, maybe they're just overlooking an overzealous ban-bot.
I don't think Google is necessarily doing this on purpose, but I do think, as with most Google products, they don't utilize their resources properly to gather feedback from the publishers to identify exactly where the problems are and what is occurring in order to properly resolve them. Instead they see a fire internally and attempt to put it out which just pushes the problem to another area. Adwords, and in turn Adsense, are the bread and butter for Google earnings, and while I understand it is nearly impossible to handle every publisher issue they must receive, Google has a bad reputation when it comes to dealing with any problem at all. I do know that when your Adsense account reaches I believe $100 a week (not positive on the exact amount but that is what it was at one time) in earnings you do get direct email access to their support team, but even this is not enough in most cases.
It doesn't take long to do a quick Google search to see that these issues are not isolated to one or two users. It is a systematic problem that has been occurring for several years now. Some larger publishers have even identified specific IP addresses for click bots and reported them to Google, yet Google does nothing to ban these IP addresses causing more users to experience the problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say you don't agree with a particular site that's using adsense. You could (for instance) have you and all your friends click over and over again on the ads on that site, which Google will quickly flag as fraudulent. Any site that attracts a large number of fraudulent clicks is going to get their AdSense account banned. The site owner has no recourse if this happens to them: they agreed to it when they signed up in t…
Say you don't agree with a particular site that's using adsense. You could (for instance) have you and all your friends click over and over again on the ads on that site, which Google will quickly flag as fraudulent. Is it really that easy to put a gun to any random adsense user's head?
It's been an hour, and a very clear trend is emerging: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bar+graph+13%2C+5%2C+10... Is there any reason why 4x more people would be banned within four days of a payout than any other part of the cycle? (This presupposes the poll results can be trusted, which seems dubious at best. But if this survey is trustworthy, then I wonder what it implies.)
It's a voluntary poll, hence not reliable. I would never trust an HN poll for something as significant as this. If the results were true it would be worrying, but we need much stronger evidence than this.
AdWords and AdSense policies tell advertisers and publishers that advertiser spending on evicted publishers are refunded for the preceding 60 days. Because this policy has to do with revenue recognition, it's presumably under SOX control, so it would be difficult and very risky to willfully violate it.
So Google faces a larger cash loss if they cancel a publisher just after a payout than if they do so before. And they have no incentive to cancel publishers just to keep the money: they refund the advertisers, so they lose not only their share of the advertising spend, but they have to pay the publisher share of any unrecoverable previous payout out of their own pockets.
Disclosure: I used to work for Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a voluntary poll, hence not reliable. I would never trust an HN poll for something as significant as this. If the results were true it would be worrying, but we need much stronger evidence than this.
Hmm... possibly. It seems strange that this particular poll would attract so many trolls, though. Surely there are some troll results, but most of the results are showing that people are getting banned within 4 days of payout. As long as >75% of participants are honest voters, then it doesn't seem like the trolls could skew the results to the extent that we're seeing.