191–200 of 300 posts
For as many articles that there are about how great, smart, [fill in another positive adjective] Google is, I'm surprised that no news source has pointed out the ridiculous behavior of Google. Who else would you work with (i.e., display advertising for) without having the ability to speak to someone by telephone when a difficult situation has occurred? None of our customers would tolerate this -- why do we continue t…
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You are completely right- I think the general feeling is that Google needs to do a better job of communicating that to content creators. This guy clearly didn't realize the extent of the damage, and said he would return adsense revenue from the website. They could fairly disable adsense on the website, but knocking the YouTube revenue just seems unnecessary after giving a very stern warning. People find it troubling…
I would suggest a "three strikes" approach. The program warns you (because it may not be your fault) then the program blocks you for, say, 30 days and then you are banned. Disclaimer: I was banned from AdSense too and I still don't know what happened. Since my site had very low traffic, I suspect even one well meaning fan could clickfraud me into nonexistence.
For as many articles that there are about how great, smart, [fill in another positive adjective] Google is, I'm surprised that no news source has pointed out the ridiculous behavior of Google. Who else would you work with (i.e., display advertising for) without having the ability to speak to someone by telephone when a difficult situation has occurred? None of our customers would tolerate this -- why do we continue t…
For reasons of economics. As an analogy, if you're a one-person developer, your problem is usually that you don't have enough users. You can participate in forum discussions with users of your software, fix bugs within days, send a personalized thank you e-mail for every purchase, all to provide exceptional level of service to grow word of mouth and get more customers. When you get to the size of Microsoft, that won'…
I agree right up to this point.
The economics of online advertising are extremely harsh when you add up the attention span of online users, the ease of fraud, and the feedback available to advertisers. It's a sea change that people need to come to terms with one way or another.
However the level to which Google dehumanizes publishers is quite likely to bite them in the ass. Enough of these articles and their publisher base will eventually shrink and open the door the competition. Now obviously the competition will not be able to change the economics, but PR is not Google's forté, and it's possible to do a much better job handling these incidents without any change in the economics.
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The rule says you can't encourage your visitors to click. It doesn't say that you have to actively discourage people from clicking to ensure only those most determined to buy the product actually click. As to him "looking the other way", he explicitly said he replied by telling them to only click on adverts that they were interested in. I'd say he went above and beyond.
The problem is he built up a kinship with his viewers which included his financial plight: I film myself huddling around a tray of candles in the boat as the ice slides past the hull in the winter. Then he tells them a way he makes money: yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers You say that's not encouragement? Well, others thought it was enough to comment ab…
I think you're reading way too much into his remarks.
Most small sailing boats have only small auxiliary engines or batteries providing DC power. Safety requires power conservation. But video cameras require light to record an image, and most pro video lighting consumers a lot of juice but doesn't run on DC power. If it's not windy, candles efficiently provide both heat and light, and solve other video problems as well (color aesthetics).
My dad sails, I've worked most of the last decade in independent film. Anyone who's into sailing or pro video understands that both are fairly high-maintenance activities with a significant cost of both time and equipment (and that discussions of this overhead is a regular conversation topic). I find it quite easy to believe he makes an overall loss on the sailing vids at present, although over a few years it has the potential to provide greater revenue (eg a documentary of the entire journey, gradual accumulation of subscribers etc.).
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The rule is "Don't directly or indirectly tell people to click on your ads." The reason for this is that loyal audiences will , if you tell them to click on ads, click on ads to support you. This is exactly what happened. The CTR goes through the roof, the advertisers get billed lots of money, and no commerce takes place.
Perhaps I did not read carefully enough, but I didn't read anything that made it seem like he directly or indirectly asked anything. He simply makes a point of being 100% transparent in how he runs his business; part of that was explaining that ad clicks improve his revenue. Did Google expect him to lie?
I don't particularly like Google's lack of transparency, but all this stuff is in the terms you're required to agree to before you start using an AdSense account. Yes, it's a big scary legal document, but you can't say they didn't warn you.
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The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely scraping by. That's unnecessarily harsh. The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind: by endorsing the ads that were being displayed, he would get more money, but they would…
The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind That may be what he has in mind, but experience shows that isn't what happens. Instead you get a situation where people with no interest whatsoever in purchasing anything click the link just to help out the website they are interested in. Just because the traffic comes from the targeted demographic doesn't mean it's actually serious. I'm not saying that Google…
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The problem is he built up a kinship with his viewers which included his financial plight: I film myself huddling around a tray of candles in the boat as the ice slides past the hull in the winter. Then he tells them a way he makes money: yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers You say that's not encouragement? Well, others thought it was enough to comment ab…
The problem is he built up a kinship with his viewers which included his financial plight: I film myself huddling around a tray of candles in the boat as the ice slides past the hull in the winter. I think you're reading way too much into his remarks. Most small sailing boats have only small auxiliary engines or batteries providing DC power. Safety requires power conservation. But video cameras require light to recor…
Regardless of the technical reasons for it, I believe the huddling around a tray of candles with ice sliding by is striking visual imagery. Heck, even I feel moved by that, and I'd feel ten times more connected to this guy if I were a regular sailor.
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I can not agree. There is an enormous difference between click-farming and a courteous 'please support this site by considering the fine offerings of my advertisers.' Also, to cut off all his YouTube income because of a misreading of his pitch on a tiny subscription-driven site is BS - there's no sign that he abused YouTube in any way. I appreciate that a more responsive feedback loop can be exploited by bad guys as…
His practice is a clear case of click fraud and his above-normal click-through rates demonstrate that he was successful in that fraudulent behavior. Google correctly identified his business as dishonest and terminated his account per agreement that the guy signed when he started using AdSense. You try to make a case for Google trying to determine shades of gray, but it's a non-scalable, slippery slope. The current ru…
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The rule is "Don't directly or indirectly tell people to click on your ads." The reason for this is that loyal audiences will , if you tell them to click on ads, click on ads to support you. This is exactly what happened. The CTR goes through the roof, the advertisers get billed lots of money, and no commerce takes place.
Did you read the Mea Culpa? Unless Mr. Winter is lying, Zak's question still stands. It seems like there is a potential for injustice when the reviews are held in secret like they were. All Google put forth was that there was a risk of generating invalid [click] activity . As one who, like you, pays for that invalid activity I am glad to see Google do what they can to stem it. But it gets very serious in my mind when…