Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense with Google's AdSense?
OmnipotentEntity asks: "I usually come down hard on the side of Google, as I feel that they have a good philosophy and they follow it. However, a forum I regularly visit had a run in with the bad side of Google's AdSense program, and our AdSense account was terminated because of 'invalid click activity.' Some research by a fellow member of the boards turned up other people facing the same problems we ran into. These problems seem localized to sites hosted in Europe. I'm an American, so I have no clue about the European side of AdSense. Have any of our European webmasters ran into the same problems, or are these simply isolated incidents? Is anyone in America experiencing similar difficulties?"
Sczecin, Poland - Not having these issues with adsense.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The DigitalPoint forum has a lot of AdSense discussion. It's quite often you hear about people getting banned for "invalid clicks". Rarely (or never) do you hear of people getting back in, or, unfortunately, ever getting any good explanation for it.
Well a site I ran to host a guild forum got it canceled just as I was reaching my first $100 and the same happened to the guy who writes this funny blog I read (just as he was reaching his first $100 as well): http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com/ (post about it: http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com/2006/04/seri ous-note.html)
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
I can't comment on the site in question, but in general AdSense and web forums are not always a good match. Forums often get a fairly small number of highly active viewers, which give rise to one of two phenomena: a) they don't click on the ads much (low clickthru rate), and when they do it sticks out statistically like a sore thumb, leading to possible (mis)interpretation regarding click fraud; or b) the more enthusiastic users take it upon themselves to click regularly on ads to support their forum, which will also raise a few red flags.
Forums can sometimes do well with AdSense if they have a high ratio of "read only" users and take steps such as not showing ads to logged in users.
It's funny to see someone named OmnipotentEntity asking for help... ;)
The better you are treated. Seems obvious, but there are a quite a few small publishers that don't make enough for Google to go to any trouble over. Fraudulent click activity? If the advertisers are getting angry, its easier just to say "We have banned the site in question." than to actually find and deal with the source of the problem. They need to be seen to strike a balance - and it's much easier to be harsh to someone that is only bringing your company $100 / week than someone who brings in $100k / week.
A touch cynical? Perhaps, but consider that: they have recently made some Big Changes(TM) to they way they crawl (aka Big Daddy(TM)); they have admitted a storage problem; and their stock has slipped recently. What better message to send to publishers that "We are tough on fraudulent clicks" to restore confidence.
I'm not bashing them. Seriously. Business is business. They run their advertising program, they determine the TOS and how they are applied. It's not like alternatives aren't avaliable (one recently launched at the Center of attention...). Anyway, it isn't all bad news. There is a publisher who netted over $1M from AdSense in three short months. Yes, you heard me, net. And this publisher isn't a corp, business or big team. Just one guy with a whole lotta pageviews. I bet he's treated very well by the folks at the 'plex...
So while ther may indeed be a problem/conspiracy/whatever, do consider that 1) they may actually be engaging in click fraud (eg "drawing undue attention to advertisements") or 2) they may be more of a liability than they are worth.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I saw some discussion about this over on Metafilter. One of the comments in this thread about Pinknews being dropped from AdSense says that it may be a side effect of Google's right hand not knowing what the left one is doing.
The commenter mentioned that AdSense had been placing a lot of high-CPC ads on his site, and shortly thereafter, he was banned. He suspects that Google's marketing department decided to push some big-revenue ads out there, and then the Fraud department, running their usual heuristics, noted spikes in big-revenue clicks. So they disabled many perfectly legitimate webmasters for something that Google itself caused. You could argue that this is fraud on Google's part, since these webmasters are deprived of legitimately-earned revenue. Worse, since they're banned for life from the program, in many cases their small businesses will be destroyed. And there is no appeal and no recourse.
In fact, there is absolutely no way to talk to Google about any of this, so problems like this only get worse. I suspect it may take lawsuits to get them to change their ways.
Google's mantra needs to add: "Do as little accidental evil as possible, and fix it when we do." But I don't see that happening soon.
It sure sounds like you could easily write a script to get people banned from google AdSense. (Just download all their JS with wget and a referrer of the host site)
I was thinking about using Google AdSense for one of my websites but because I monitor the site very frequently, I'm afraid I would get banned. Oh well I'll no longer be linking to Google.
The Google Love-Fest stops NOW!
-Disgruntled Googler
I know of two different sites, both of which I'm good friends with the webmasters, who had their accounts recently disabled for "invalid click activity". One of my friends had a random 140 clicks one day, and they disabled his account a few days later. No, they didn't pay him the $180 that they owed, him; no, they didn't give him a better reason upon emailing them. His site (a u.s. site) was rather small, ~200 unique per day. The other site (a Canadian one), which has over 160,000 unique per day was also cancelled for invalid click activity in much the same way--no explanation; they lost somewhere around $500. You bet, I'm damn worried that someone random will come click on my site someday and get me disabled off of adsense. They're either screwing us over, someone's screwing google over by clicking on a bunch of sites, or they just simply want to get rid of all of the accounts that didn't have the mandatory address/tax information submissions. I just don't know, but I hope it doesn't happen to me.
..my server's in the UK, so does that mean it's european? Or just where they send money to (Canada, in my case)? ;-)
I don't make any significant amounts of money though, so I don't think there's much fraud that could occur
Death by snoo-snoo!
...or "touch wood" for you Aussies out there...
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
This happens with all sorts of web related business stuff (eg. PayPal, anything dealing with credit cards, etc.). Unforetunately the companies are rarely ever forthcoming about why certain things happen because they need that security by obscurity lest someone take advantage of how the system works.
So you may never know why certain things are done.
This is one area where I think we need some regulation. An intermediary or something that can give people due process and justice.
Oh man, that reeks of something horri - oh wait, I know. Troll, anyone?
Made me laugh to read through it though. It should get +5 Funny.
Death by snoo-snoo!
Google rocks, so its all good.
Is anyone suprised that a company with no management hierarchy and a powerful peer-review based merit system (aka cliques) is acting in an arbritary manner? Or that a company with no discernable means to talk to a human being unless you are a VIP treats customers like shit?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
They could just be blunt when booting the smallest publishers, but that would be bad PR; and completely flying in the face of "do no evil" (something Matt Cutts recently reaffirmed).
Saying "We cut small advertisers" = bad PR, "doing evil"
Saying "We are tough on click fraud" = good PR (to advertisers, Wall St, et al); "Don't be evil"
I should point out here that my point was interpretive, ie "Google is doing foo, hence you could say bar". The serious point is that under Google's TOS, clickfraud itself can be widely interpreted.
Ever clicked your own ad? By mistake? Checking it works? Clickfraud. Told family / friends / coworkers you have a website [with fancy Google ads]? Did they click to "help you out"? Clickfraud. Drawn 'undue attention' to your ads (as interpreted by the powers that be at Google) that resulted in a click? Clickfraud. While these don't fall under the definition of I-bought-a-robot-to-generate-1000s-of-clicks, or other egregious violations, Google could call it clickfraud if it so wished.
While these are small potatoes to Google, they are still technically valid reasons to terminate an AdSense account. Maybe Google would use such a technicality as an excuse to terminate an account that was small and a liability to them, maybe they wouldn't. Draw your own conclusions.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
So, there are all these sites wanting to show ad's and google wont let them. WHERE is the alternatives? Come on, if google wont spent 10 minutes and at least email the website author with more details than "you fucked up, bye bye" Maybe its time to drop google.
If google is this fucked up, why keep using it. Sounds like some other company needs to step in and fill the void. I'm rather tired of googles "fuck you" attitude towards webmasters in these slashdot posts.
A friend at work mistyped gmail.com as gamil.com which is an actual site... with google ads... which suggest typing lessons.
Didn't the Jackass! distribution of Gentoo also had the same problem?
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-345229.html (near the bottom)
Meh, it's a copypaste from ShellyTheRepublican.com
It's Just trying to drive up adsense revenue at that site.
Don't humour them and they will go away.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
other then the fact that, that was the stupidist thing i have ever read, you do realise, that your "american" computer was built in tiwan right? so, how do you go out in public with out getting shot for your stupid ways?
"other than"
and taiwan
Stop feeding trolls >:(
Death by snoo-snoo!
I'm a regular visitor of that site. There were never any Google Ads on the forums, they only showed up on the main page which is very frequently visited by non-contributing guests from all over the world that just come over for the downloads. There's actually a very small number of people visiting (let along actively contributing) to the forums.
other then the fact that, that was the stupidist thing i have ever read, you do realise, that your "american" computer was built in tiwan right? so, how do you go out in public with out getting shot for your stupid ways?
And stupidest, and without, and fewer commas. Nice try though!
I used to run adsense in a hobby site i run. One day after doing a code modification i was checking out the site. One of the ads appeared in adsense was very absurdly worded and caught my attention. I clicked on to check what it was. It was some place selling ebooks etc or sorts i dont remember now.
After some time, i logged on to check the adsense account. A little later that day, voila - invalid click activity, account disabled ! No responses except a pre scripted stupid, flat-face, cold text.
It seems that the moderation / the staff that created the moderation code were MORON enough to think that there were people who would attempt to earn a total of additional $0.5 by clicking (with the same ip !) 5-10 times a day on their ads, and then be stupid enough to log in to their system without changing their ip ! So this is it - if you mistakenly log in to your account, after clicking on an ad with the same ip, nomatter what reason - youre bust. And the people who actually do such frauds do it with scripts that change ips automatically from amongs the ip farms in their networks which they are maintaining for that purpose still.
This does not end there either. I heard that if somebody has some grudge with you, and gathers 10 or so persons to click on the ads at your site regularly for a week without your knowledge or slightest idea, voila - youre blown away again. So its not too much an effort for the competitors to oust their 'foes' in schemes that only monastery nuns do not know.
Google may be doing things the right way in many endevours, however it is clear that they have hired the wrong bunch of idiots to define what is fraud, and what is not.
Read radical news here
My account with Google Adsense was cancelled for this exact same reason. Oddly, it was cacelled the exact day after I earned my first $100, so I never recieved a check. Honestly, though, I wasn't too bent up over it. The site looks better without advertisements anyways.
There was a really good article in Wired, that I couldn't find by searching Wired but popped right up in google, called something like Click fraud could swallow the internet.
It's an interesting article, but the main reason I bring it up is because sometimes, as they say in the article, competitors are actually the ones going to sites and committing click fraud just to get the site kicked off AdSense.
I live in Germany, my server is in Germany and my site is German aswell. Running AdSense since Dec '04, no problems so far. I even accidentially clicked on my own ads, I sent them [Google] an E-Mail, stating the time and site where I clicked them, and they just reverted the money I got from that click (and strongly advised me to never do this again ;) ). That's it. It's still running.
My Blog: "sum it up - News, emotions and science"
Shouldn't be that hard to set up something that produces a few "illegal" clicks if there is danger that the customer is about to earn real money (i.e. >$100). Alternatively, it shouldn't be that hard to redefine the term "illegal click" to match your site or reinterpret clicks to be seen as "illegal" ("oh, someone clicked" --> illegal) if the offense is never verifiable. Either option sounds like shady business.
so close yet so far buddy. better luck next time, or even better, don't post next time.
Our only choice is to keep going the way we have been, or change our domain name, into which we have invested a lot of brand-recognition...
Google _is_ Evil after all.
They are there to exploit their monopolistic position. When I signed up, I could advertise ad $0.05 per click; their claim is that the price depends on the ad quality and on clickthrough rate, meaning that if your ad contains the keywords you selected, then it should cost less. Then, they claim that a higher click-through reduces the cost.
I could not once change the cost per click by targeting ads to keywords. What's worse, after people started clicking on my ads, costs increased, in one instance from 0.05 to 0.50 per click. Now I have no keywords costing less than $0.20 and most cost upwards of $.40
This time we've instructed ALL members not to click on Google Ads on our site, ever, no matter if they were interested in the link or not.
They never paid us for the first account (it was fradulent, after all *rolls eyes*) and we haven't yet been sent money for the second try either. But I bet they don't refund the money advertisers pay them when they close an account.
I'd like to know exactly what kind of fraud detection they use. Is it by IP addesses, or some kind of link layer MAC address logging, or do they just cancel your shit if you exceed statistically expected performance? In my eyes, the first two are valid, the third is a crock of crap.
I support the FairTax www.fairtax.org
Although you personally were not to blame, your case was indeed one of deliberate fraud and Google was smart enough to figure it out. In this sense, Google is acting responsibly. In borderline cases where they can not be completely sure, they play it safe. They may not trust a site and are unwilling to do business with it again themselves, but they don't publically malign it. In cases where they know for a fact that real deliberate fraud occured, it is responsible of them to warn others.
I have had the same problem as well. Some random person hit my site up with 40 clicks after I got a few links from other sites. My account was terminated a few days later. Google gives the opportunity to appeal, but I chose not to do so. This also means that if someone were to have something against a site that runs AdSense, they could effectively shut down the source of income by mass clicking over a day or two. I was considering running a story about this on a few sites, but in the end Google can do as they want with little or no challenge. Google the next Microsoft? Maybe.
Zorix
Another point is that if you refer someone to Google Adsense, you get $100 when that person's account reaches $100, so clearly there are collusion possibilities: I could get my friends to sign up and we could click on each other's ads.
So I would expect Google to check more carefully just before the first $100, when you're about to cost them money.
Having said that, I expect before long there will be moves to legislate the internet ad industry, and that advertisers and Web publishers will oppose this.
It takes a long time for legislation to sit well with technology, so I'm also not sure it'll be a good thing. It might be that voluntary practices about openness will happen in order to head off legislation, though.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
That seems hardly a sustainable 'business plan' from Google's perspective.
your case was indeed one of deliberate fraud and Google was smart enough to figure it out. In this sense, Google is acting responsibly.
I don't think so. The poster you responded to didn't do anything fraudulent. He/she ran ads on a site. Someone tried to cheat. Where in the terms of service does it say "I will install mind control rays in my users' heads to keep them from doing that"? It's not there because it's impossible. The most Google can do and yet be fair is to just not pay the site for the script-generated clicks, and ask the site admins, if they know who did it, to warn the user not to do that again.
You are blaming the victim.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Well this is all I have to say about the matter, I am close to getting the first 100 bucks from my sites http://arcadejunkie.com/ http://snappyjack.com/ http://u1i.com/ http://infoxsports.com/ http://goodworm.com/ and you know, I dont think they will screw me, but if they do, I already signed up with yahoo ads... From the money point of view, it does not make sense for google to do that, but big companies have done worst and more stupid things in the past so we will see...
I'm not sure about you but every person who posted they weren't having a problem with adsense, I ran a click script against their website. I figure the more people that get up in arms about it the sooner something may change. Not to mention I just thought it was funny.