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Nonsense with Google's AdSense?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the searching-for-similar-experiences dept.

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?"

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. My site and.... by HTL2001 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:My site and.... by Bogtha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They NEVER will tell you what invaolid clicks there were, when, etc. So basically, they get free space on yoru site, and get out of paying, and never have to prove why.

      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
    2. Re:My site and.... by bluephone · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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 ]
  2. At last, a story to fit my username :-) by adnonsense · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. some hearsay... by Malor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. gmail.com by RedACE7500 · · Score: 4, Funny

    A friend at work mistyped gmail.com as gamil.com which is an actual site... with google ads... which suggest typing lessons.