Make Frontpage of Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News == Google Disables AdSense

waaah.

just be grateful that messrs. brin and page allowed you the privilege, for as such a brief period as it were, to make a meager pittance from these text and/or image based advertisements.

find no pity from me.

Google shoots first and doesn't ask questions later. I'm not defending google. I've been anti-google for years. I'm just saying why they disable the account. It's the easiest, automated solution to combat lots of problems like click-fraud, advertiser complaints, etc. If they don't disable the account, they have to constantly handle this type of account, the high traffic, potentially high click-thru, but low conversion attracting account.

The other solution requires making a lot of changes to a lot of accounts. The advertisers' ad positioning, the rates for the ads, which affect other adsense sites, etc. In that case, Google runs the risk of angering a lot of customers, both advertisers, and real estate providers.

The other solution: ban the account -- angers only one real estate provider.

Two points:

1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.

2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.

The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.

If only Get Satisfaction could get the Google account. . .. Perhaps Google should acquire them; that would likely solve the customer service issues people seem to be so upset about.

As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day".

I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve.

You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.