I'm interested in these refunds to advertisers. I've never received a refund, but if accounts are being banned constantly, some with tens of thousands of dollars, then it should have been noticed, especially since most of the time I hit my daily spend, then move onto the next day, you cannot just make that up 2 months later. Retroactive activities must take place.
Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
101–110 of 168 posts
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#102I got banned because someone posted some insults/porn words in a title. There was no pictures/videos... it was just words. They sent me the link where the words were and gave me something like 4 days (or was it more? It was a pretty scary amount of time anyway). I went to that url and didn't find anything, so I sent them a mail asking for more info. Never had a reply. Got banned. I discovered later that it was in the…
Can you really get banned for "insults/porn words in a title" on your website? Could you provide the email they sent you? That sounds so strange.
The problem is that advertisers don't want their brands associated with that kind of content. In order to keep advertisers happy, Google needs to police for content wrt to ads. It's a different set of rules than things like search results or YouTube.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my state (Missouri) Small Claims Court seems to work fairly well for these types of things. It does take a lot of time, so it probably isn't "worth" it in a purely monetary sense, but it is worth it to me in an ethical sense. It is fraud, pure and simple.
It isn't fraud. The legal requirements for such are subtle and numerous, but basically require knowledge and intent which are difficult to prove and unlikely in most or all of these scenarios. Google has to do it's best to serve it's customers on both sides, those who display ads and those who pay for advertisers. Cheating exists, the mechanisms to mitigate that cheating aren't perfect, and each side loses some as a…
"each side loses some as a result"
Side 1: advertisers, budget: millions
Side 2: small content providers, revenue: hundreds
There's no way that's balanced.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#104I had AdSense on my blog for a couple months, and then was banned just before I earned $100 and qualified for my first payout. Now, when I see Google ads, I click on a couple just to mess up their statistics. I really should write a browser extension that does it automatically.
So, because you got banned you set yourself to make the problem worse... Well played... NOT!
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#105The problem isn't when you get banned, it is the fact that Google refuses to clearly communicate the reasons when there is real money at stake.
Google: "you delivered 30k worth of ads but I don't owe you anything because you broke the rules. I will not tell you which rules you broke or the URLs of the offending pages though, you will have to trust me"
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the links. I was uncertain the context for this HN post. Also, Matt's reply is really helpful.
Matt's reply (or denial) is useless to this conversation. I have a great deal of respect for Matt and his contributions to the SEO community but he's quite possibly the last person I would expect to confirm, or even give credence to a claim like this given his connection to Google. Asking the ad department if they've been stealing money from thousands of publishers over the last several years? Of course they're going…
By this measure, the comment of every single person who says that they were cut off innocently is just as useless to this conversation. Are people going to admit that they thought they could click ads on their site endlessly through Tor proxies?
confirming would essentially be an admission a very serious crime.
Serious crime? It is actually a problem (there needs to be more competition in this space), but Google can tell any publisher to stuff it at any time. They don't need to have a reason. Now generally that doesn't make sense if they're making money on the relationship, but we know that in many cases they aren't -- that a lot of shady sites undermine the trust advertisers have in the platform.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#107Tested out Adsense, saw it performed better. Switched all our ads to Adsense, big mistake. We got banned right before the payout date and ended-up making almost zero for the entire month. Big lesson learned. Edit: To further clarify, we were expecting to receive a payment in the low five figures. Also, during that month I was invited to a special Google event where I spoke one on one with AdSense employees on how to…
So ... what happened when you followed it up?
Emailed the contacts I made at the AdSense event, they said they'd look into it but never responded. Contacted my friends at Google who referred me to other AdSense employees, those contacts also ended up no longer responding to emails.
Going through the usual appeal process just returned automated messages, which also ended up in a dead end. So eventually we just moved on.
Funny enough, I was able to dig up an old blog post by the AdSense team with my photo: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/09/continuing-adsense-in-yo.... There's me holding up a big chalkboard, two weeks before getting banned off their platform. That was years ago, so I've since moved on but it was a good lesson learned.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#108I 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…
You don't get billions of dollars by ignoring small change.
Sure ... mind the pennies, but don't risk your dollars to do so (aka penny wise and pound foolish). Ads are a trust business, and a lack of trust erodes their entire business away.
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#109So what's a good alternative to AdSense?
Re: Poll: Were you banned by AdSense? When in the cycle were you notified?
#110I got banned too, lost $100, and would like to see google go to hell just for that.
Never fuck up with my money.