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We were banned from AdSense in 2010 with no explanation. https://www.choiceofgames.com/2010/08/were-banned-from-google-adsense/ https://www.choiceofgames.com/20

We were banned from AdSense in 2010 with no explanation. https://www.choiceofgames.com/2010/08/were-banned-from-google-adsense/ https://www.choiceofgames.com/2010/08/were-banned-from-googl... Over the years, Google has published posts like these, little FAQs that tell you nothing useful. Just once I wish they'd answer the only question anybody really has: what do I do if I'm innocent? What if Google made a mistake? There's a clear path forward for organizations who admit wrongdoing and promise to change, but no one can help you if you've done nothing wrong.

Entangled 10y ago
Around the same time I created a web page just for currency exchange in my country, a kind of fire and forget page that had like a thousand visitors a day, nothing big. I swear to god that I've never ever clicked an ad on that page which I seldom visited, once a month I checked my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average... Then all of a sudden bam!, unplugged without any reason, they stole my money and never gave any chance to appeal. Sent an email that got an automated response, sent another one got the same automated response, then gave up. They served all the ads, they got all the money from advertisers, they pocketed it all including my goddamn money. Plain thievery if you ask me, no matter how you dress it with all the PR in the world.
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  > my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average... > they pocketed it all including my goddamn money. It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - joecool1029 10y ago
    >It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms It's worth pointing out that there's ways to claw it back even after that point: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58268-2005Apr16.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58268-2005Apr...
- ec109685 10y ago
  I don't think they charged the advertisers for those clicks since they thought them fraudulent.
  - Entangled 10y ago
    Yeah right, after five years? Do you think they returned the money? What if most advertisers were one off shots to hit the jackpot on a new startup and failed within six months? Who did they give the money back? Their own pockets? Come on, PR may say "oh no, we give that money to charity" while texting from a yacht in the middle of the caribbean.
    - clessg 10y ago
      Given Google's continuous refusal to provide an adequate resolution mechanism despite all the negative PR, we can only assume they have a strong financial motivation to not provide it. Interestingly, AdSense bans are almost always around pay day. We don't know what they do with the funds after an account is banned — we can only go on their word and goodwill, which we know is not to be trusted.
lloydde 10y ago
If you can figure out what is the problem... I had a similarly frustrating experience on why my simple blog was banned... probably around the same year as you. It's pretty rich that Google post claims that it is increasing transparency. Still sounds very opaque. The URL they gave was the home page and they wouldn't provide any specific information. I was already banned. The only theories I had at the time was related to the very international traffic of my blog. As WordPress developer very active in the community I had a lot of international traffic and some of it was trying all types of strange hacks on my site. I used it as a bit of a honeypot. I couldn't find any specific traffic that made sense so. My other theory had me blaming CloudFlare, who at the time, and undocumented, would throw up ads if the traffic seemed suspicious. The only way I found out about that was thanks to an Eastern European coworker, who let me know. Though that post makes it sounded like that blog might not have been banned for life like the emails from Google at the time implied. I could have likely used my own network of Google friends to get more clues, but the ad revenue was a trickle and I really only had it on to test the related WordPress plugins and to experience the same interfaces and workflows as my customers. It wasn't worth anyone's time.
- lloydde 10y ago
  I'm also reminded in those years my boss at the time Matt Mullenweg wrote, "Google Adsense, which has been declining in quality and is no longer a great choice for bloggers". https://ma.tt/2011/10/federated-media-deal/ https://ma.tt/2011/10/federated-media-deal/ What are the popular advertising networks for small, independent bloggers now?
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    The Deck is one, although they're specifically meant for the arts/creative sector. They have a serious privacy policy and the ads are unobtrusive, though of course that means the rates are lower.
    - dantiberian 10y ago
      The Deck is great, but invite-only.
clessg 10y ago
This blog post is a slap in the face. Google should be ashamed. We had been using AdSense for 10 years and had our account disabled after a competitor used a bot to click on the ads 10k+ times. This particular individual messaged me after doing so and bragged about how our account would be banned. We forwarded the message to Google, asked them to remove those clicks, and told them we took measures to prevent this individual from doing it again. The next month, we were banned by Google on pay day. We appealed and got an automated denial. When we tried to get information from our Google contacts, we were told to make sure our family wasn't clicking on the ads. Fortunately, we weren't reliant on AdSense, but it was insulting to be treated like children by this company. I'm glad that I won't have to deal with such an unethical company again, at least until they randomly disable my Google account. So, to sum up this blog post: your competitors can spend a couple bucks to shut you down permanently, and Google will treat you like a child.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Whoever that competitor is, you should publically blast them assuming you have the proof you say. I'd make it my life's work to call them out as often as possible if I were you. People who operate business like this, need to be called out and blacklisted.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Same here. I was bringing this up in a thread here a few days ago and was downvoted but it is a disgrace to work with clients in such a disconnected way.
- adventurer 10y ago
  I used them 7+ years until a few weeks back. I had one aging website I literally had not posted anything new to in about 3+ years, and rarely visited. It made enough to have withdraw possible every few months. The only thing I can think of is the few videos on a youtube channel with a few thousand views posted about a year back. They probably were making $5/year. I'm not sure how I am banned for invalid ad clicks when I was barely making any revenue or have traffic. No explanation. Appeal sent on the 16th of Feb saying it will take a week or more to process. Still waiting. What a a joke.
ganeshkrishnan 10y ago
Google banned my Play Developer account business account and everything associated with it. My colleague got everything in Google banned because he had a college project uploaded in his developer account which apparently used a hollywood star in his app screenshots. He lost his play dev account, gmail, google docs and adsense. Banned FOREVER. Do NOT trust google with your business or use their business suite. They have no interest in customer support I have customer support for business account but apparently the banning is done by some other team and this customer support has no way to reach them. They don't even respond to emails. I spoke to Google senior engineer on his reddit AMA thread who agreed that I was banned due to mistake in their bot but he never logged on to reddit again to help me out.
- BorisMelnik 10y ago
  yep, happens all the time. I have so many examples of legit customers getting banned, they truly don't care. Personally I'm an AdWords customer but I always have a backup.
rdtsc 10y ago
> little FAQs that tell you nothing useful. At first it seems like they'd finally clarify exactly how to address the problem: "Understanding ... suspension" - "Oh! Finally, I'll get my answers", but then manage to do none of that. At least they use a nice and friendly conversational style so the user feels a temporary comfort before being told to go fuck themselves. It is a very good example of PR and corporate-speak. They were criticized for not addressing the problem before. So they've managed to address the problem ... but without really addressing is. Now I guess they probably meant to say "we don't want to disclose how to prove your innocence because then fraudsters would figure out how to game that". For example, I would have probably just told customers that, and maybe apologized. Or you know, maybe hired some more customer support people to handle individual cases. But that's why I don't do corporate PR and just write code instead.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tedivm 10y ago
This happened to me when I was in college- I had been running a small forum and it made enough to help with school books but not much else. They left the ads running on my site until I attempted to withdraw the money, at which point they suspended me with no recourse. This was the first of many very disappointing encounters with Google, and I always try to stress to people that if they are at all reliant on Google for money they are basically playing the lottery with their livelihood. I'll be the first to admit I'm still bitter over this, but as a college student with not a lot of money Google's decision to steal from me had a real impact.
tinus_hn 10y ago
Actually they do tell you: there is no appeal so your only option is to leave the platform.
justbaker 10y ago
SAME. No explanation; I did nothing to violate any policy, which involves clicking my own ads or suggesting to my users to do the same. A larger proportion of the revenue was the 100,000+ page views a day. They did nothing when this suspension was appealed besides the same old response, and ignored any appeal.
justbaker 10y ago
SAME. No explanation; I did nothing to violate any policy, which involves clicking my own ads or suggesting to my users to do the same. A larger proportion of the revenue was the 100,000+ page views a day. They did nothing when this suspension was appealed besides the same old response, and ignored any appeal.

Entangled 10y ago

Around the same time I created a web page just for currency exchange in my country, a kind of fire and forget page that had like a thousand visitors a day, nothing big. I swear to god that I've never ever clicked an ad on that page which I seldom visited, once a month I checked my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average... Then all of a sudden bam!, unplugged without any reason, they stole my money and never gave any chance to appeal. Sent an email that got an automated response, sent another one got the same automated response, then gave up. They served all the ads, they got all the money from advertisers, they pocketed it all including my goddamn money. Plain thievery if you ask me, no matter how you dress it with all the PR in the world.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
> my winnings and they were adding up like $5 a month on average... > they pocketed it all including my goddamn money. It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- joecool1029 10y ago
  >It's worth pointing out that it's not your money until it's in your bank account and they can't claw it back. Unless you are really driving serious traffic, it's best not to expect any payout from any of these ad platforms It's worth pointing out that there's ways to claw it back even after that point: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58268-2005Apr16.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58268-2005Apr...
ec109685 10y ago
I don't think they charged the advertisers for those clicks since they thought them fraudulent.
- Entangled 10y ago
  Yeah right, after five years? Do you think they returned the money? What if most advertisers were one off shots to hit the jackpot on a new startup and failed within six months? Who did they give the money back? Their own pockets? Come on, PR may say "oh no, we give that money to charity" while texting from a yacht in the middle of the caribbean.
  - clessg 10y ago
    Given Google's continuous refusal to provide an adequate resolution mechanism despite all the negative PR, we can only assume they have a strong financial motivation to not provide it. Interestingly, AdSense bans are almost always around pay day. We don't know what they do with the funds after an account is banned — we can only go on their word and goodwill, which we know is not to be trusted.

lloydde 10y ago

If you can figure out what is the problem... I had a similarly frustrating experience on why my simple blog was banned... probably around the same year as you. It's pretty rich that Google post claims that it is increasing transparency. Still sounds very opaque. The URL they gave was the home page and they wouldn't provide any specific information. I was already banned. The only theories I had at the time was related to the very international traffic of my blog. As WordPress developer very active in the community I had a lot of international traffic and some of it was trying all types of strange hacks on my site. I used it as a bit of a honeypot. I couldn't find any specific traffic that made sense so. My other theory had me blaming CloudFlare, who at the time, and undocumented, would throw up ads if the traffic seemed suspicious. The only way I found out about that was thanks to an Eastern European coworker, who let me know. Though that post makes it sounded like that blog might not have been banned for life like the emails from Google at the time implied. I could have likely used my own network of Google friends to get more clues, but the ad revenue was a trickle and I really only had it on to test the related WordPress plugins and to experience the same interfaces and workflows as my customers. It wasn't worth anyone's time.

lloydde 10y ago
I'm also reminded in those years my boss at the time Matt Mullenweg wrote, "Google Adsense, which has been declining in quality and is no longer a great choice for bloggers". https://ma.tt/2011/10/federated-media-deal/ https://ma.tt/2011/10/federated-media-deal/ What are the popular advertising networks for small, independent bloggers now?
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  The Deck is one, although they're specifically meant for the arts/creative sector. They have a serious privacy policy and the ads are unobtrusive, though of course that means the rates are lower.
  - dantiberian 10y ago
    The Deck is great, but invite-only.

clessg 10y ago

This blog post is a slap in the face. Google should be ashamed. We had been using AdSense for 10 years and had our account disabled after a competitor used a bot to click on the ads 10k+ times. This particular individual messaged me after doing so and bragged about how our account would be banned. We forwarded the message to Google, asked them to remove those clicks, and told them we took measures to prevent this individual from doing it again. The next month, we were banned by Google on pay day. We appealed and got an automated denial. When we tried to get information from our Google contacts, we were told to make sure our family wasn't clicking on the ads. Fortunately, we weren't reliant on AdSense, but it was insulting to be treated like children by this company. I'm glad that I won't have to deal with such an unethical company again, at least until they randomly disable my Google account. So, to sum up this blog post: your competitors can spend a couple bucks to shut you down permanently, and Google will treat you like a child.

nodesocket 10y ago
Whoever that competitor is, you should publically blast them assuming you have the proof you say. I'd make it my life's work to call them out as often as possible if I were you. People who operate business like this, need to be called out and blacklisted.
tluyben2 10y ago
Same here. I was bringing this up in a thread here a few days ago and was downvoted but it is a disgrace to work with clients in such a disconnected way.
adventurer 10y ago
I used them 7+ years until a few weeks back. I had one aging website I literally had not posted anything new to in about 3+ years, and rarely visited. It made enough to have withdraw possible every few months. The only thing I can think of is the few videos on a youtube channel with a few thousand views posted about a year back. They probably were making $5/year. I'm not sure how I am banned for invalid ad clicks when I was barely making any revenue or have traffic. No explanation. Appeal sent on the 16th of Feb saying it will take a week or more to process. Still waiting. What a a joke.

ganeshkrishnan 10y ago

Google banned my Play Developer account business account and everything associated with it. My colleague got everything in Google banned because he had a college project uploaded in his developer account which apparently used a hollywood star in his app screenshots. He lost his play dev account, gmail, google docs and adsense. Banned FOREVER. Do NOT trust google with your business or use their business suite. They have no interest in customer support I have customer support for business account but apparently the banning is done by some other team and this customer support has no way to reach them. They don't even respond to emails. I spoke to Google senior engineer on his reddit AMA thread who agreed that I was banned due to mistake in their bot but he never logged on to reddit again to help me out.

BorisMelnik 10y ago
yep, happens all the time. I have so many examples of legit customers getting banned, they truly don't care. Personally I'm an AdWords customer but I always have a backup.

rdtsc 10y ago

> little FAQs that tell you nothing useful. At first it seems like they'd finally clarify exactly how to address the problem: "Understanding ... suspension" - "Oh! Finally, I'll get my answers", but then manage to do none of that. At least they use a nice and friendly conversational style so the user feels a temporary comfort before being told to go fuck themselves. It is a very good example of PR and corporate-speak. They were criticized for not addressing the problem before. So they've managed to address the problem ... but without really addressing is. Now I guess they probably meant to say "we don't want to disclose how to prove your innocence because then fraudsters would figure out how to game that". For example, I would have probably just told customers that, and maybe apologized. Or you know, maybe hired some more customer support people to handle individual cases. But that's why I don't do corporate PR and just write code instead.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tedivm 10y ago

This happened to me when I was in college- I had been running a small forum and it made enough to help with school books but not much else. They left the ads running on my site until I attempted to withdraw the money, at which point they suspended me with no recourse. This was the first of many very disappointing encounters with Google, and I always try to stress to people that if they are at all reliant on Google for money they are basically playing the lottery with their livelihood. I'll be the first to admit I'm still bitter over this, but as a college student with not a lot of money Google's decision to steal from me had a real impact.

tinus_hn 10y ago

Actually they do tell you: there is no appeal so your only option is to leave the platform.

justbaker 10y ago

SAME. No explanation; I did nothing to violate any policy, which involves clicking my own ads or suggesting to my users to do the same. A larger proportion of the revenue was the 100,000+ page views a day. They did nothing when this suspension was appealed besides the same old response, and ignored any appeal.

justbaker 10y ago