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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?"
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.
They don't give you details on the invalid clicks because it would make things a lot easier for people to reverse engineer the process they use to detect them.
You might have lost $100, but I think it's pretty clear that the amount of money Google could cheat people out of isn't anywhere near as high as the amount of money they stand to lose should Adsense's legitimacy be seriously questioned. Remember, advertising is one of Google's main cash cows. They need Adsense to survive. They don't need to scam a few people out of $100 here and there to survive.
The real question is - how can Google preserve the secrecy of their invalid click determination while still not screwing over people who haven't done anything wrong? Or, alternatively, how can they get the job done without having to keep it a secret?
I can't see any easy answers to those questions, which is why I'm hesitant to start accusing Google of screwing up. Do you have any ideas as to what Google can do in their situation?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
If they can detect "invalid clicks" then they can filter them just as well. There's no need to execute someone for jaywalking. There's nothing stopping them from warning people either, "hey, we see some unusual activity here, you should look into XYZ for solutions". None of that would risk their proprietary info. Hell, even just saying "We see a lot of clicks from these few IPs" isn't proprietary. that's just simple logging.
My point is, there are less drastic ways of handling things than cutting us off at the knees with zero recourse. We don't even get paid for the VALID clicks we generated, and they got weeks or months of space on our site.
On the gripping hand, we agreed to the TOS... That was our fault...
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]