291–300 of 300 posts
Seems like part of the problem is that YouTube revenue is tied together to revenue from AdSense for websites, even though the two services are affected by click fraud differently. Now Google is still making money from the author's popular YouTube videos, and he won't see a penny. The "correct" response would be to pull all his videos from YouTube, move them to a competing service, and write Google to let them know wh…
http://www.vimeo.com/ ?
...long story... Oh yes, I was also running little blocks of adverts provided by Adsense and, yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers – all of whom were interested in selling stuff to sailors. ...long story... In the end it was click-fraud-ish. There's a huge fear for those dependent on google adsense that they will get terminated out of the blue like this. T…
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…
A warning would have been better. But by this point he had already essentially scammed advertisers for tens of thousands of dollars (he mentions $3000 in the last 6 week period).
What would you suggest a middle-man do, if person-X has scammed your clients for tens of thousands of dollars? A polite warning, or cut them off ASAP? And remember that in this case the middle-man is the largest middle-man out there, and deals with billions of interactions.
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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…
You've wandered far off the reservation on this one. I reckon describing his actions as "fradulent" and "dishonest" is slanderous.
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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…
"Emotion can trump facts". I think the guy's point is, emotion should sometimes trump facts. No Google human was involved. A big chunk of the internet economy is controlled by a heartless robot who can't tell the difference between a middle ages sailor guy going a little over the line, and dedicated click fraud. Shit, even the IRS lets you explain to a human and maybe get a second chance.
Heck, I'd bet an algorithm would've caught it (or at least flagged it, caused a review, and had it confirmed) a loooong time ago. Which would've cut off his income while it was smaller. A smooth-functioning, impersonal algorithm may have been preferable in this case.
This flabbergasts me, because I have never ever once clicked on an advertisement [on purpose] with the intention of finding out more or purchasing an advertised product (nor the purpose to "support" a site). I literally liken it to falling for Nigerian scams. That's not to say I've never been influenced by advertising--but in general I do tend to buy store brands [cheaper] over name brands. I certainly have never been so influenced to feel the immediate actionable need to buy a product after having seen an ad.
But this isn't a rant about how I hate ads, actually I'm hoping one of you amazing HN people can explain, with logic, why and how ads work? Whats the mentality of people (sheep?) that see and ad after watching a truck video and think, gee I really must visit this car wax website and buy some car wax now. There gotta be some kind of psychology or game theory that explains the successfulness of the [online] ad industry.
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It might seem that way to you but it's not true. You can talk about AdSense all you want, as you and many others did commenting on this story. What you cannot do, for obvious reasons, is to entice people to click on ads. It doesn't matter how subtle the encouragement is, how good are your intentions, how many kids you still have to support, how many kittens you saved from certain death. It is against the rules that a…
It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement Laws are also both obvious and spelled clearly. Nevertheless we need judges to interpret them according to each situation. Even with those judges in place, we still accept that some people will be punished for moral behavior, while others will walk free for immoral behavior, because a law cannot possibly cov…
Someone is being held accountable for a contract they willingly entered. The morality of the behavior is not at issue - moral or not they legally agreed not to do it. The rest, IMO, is hand waving.
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I for one would be interested in hearing more, if you want to share.
OK, here's an anecdote. http://www.choiceofgames.com/blog/2010/08/were-banned-from-g... We're a game website -- auto-banned, appeal denied. We've done nothing wrong that we know of. Never encouraged clicking, never clicked ourselves. Since we have no access to the data, we'll never know what might have happened. One strike -- you're banned for life. I'll be at Google IO this year; my top priority is to find someone t…
From the blog post you mention, it sounds like your issue is with AdSense. I'm not on that side of the company, so I'm not sure how much assistance I can help with. I can drop an email to some folks in AdSense, but that doesn't guarantee anything of course, and I suspect they're on vacation this weekend. I'll still try to send an email though.
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3) Google bills my credit card for hundreds of dollars. Did you complain? Were you issued a refund? I'm trying to understand how Google justifies withholding past earnings from the site owner and continuing to profit from the YouTube content. If they incur real costs from refunding advertisers, it makes some sense. But if they keep everyone's money, they have an incentive to abuse the system.
>and continuing to profit from the YouTube content. I believe ads are only shown on youtube content with the permission of the copyright owner. There don't appear to be any ads on his videos at the moment. Here's an example video of his: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ma_hZ00Nqk&feature=playe...
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Can you setup separate accounts? This might be the way to go.
Nope. If you setup a separate account with any of the same personal information, Google will disable your account just before you are supposed to be paid out for your app sales. They detect that your new account is related to your banned account. That's the exact case for the individual referenced in the parent post's help forum link.
Fuck tha G-ride I want the machines that are makin em