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...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

• meterplech 16y ago
  You are completely right- I think the general feeling is that Google needs to do a better job of communicating that to content creators. This guy clearly didn't realize the extent of the damage, and said he would return adsense revenue from the website. They could fairly disable adsense on the website, but knocking the YouTube revenue just seems unnecessary after giving a very stern warning. People find it troubling that a monolithic algorithmic arbiter makes these decision that change people's lives
  • rbanffy 16y ago
    I would suggest a "three strikes" approach. The program warns you (because it may not be your fault) then the program blocks you for, say, 30 days and then you are banned. Disclaimer: I was banned from AdSense too and I still don't know what happened. Since my site had very low traffic, I suspect even one well meaning fan could clickfraud me into nonexistence.
    • eru 16y ago
      How about exponentially increasing ban times, instead of a life-time ban after the third strike? (Perhaps with even a cooling off period, if you behave well for some time.)
      • rbanffy 16y ago
        That's a brilliant idea, really. I wonder how we could generate an economic incentive for Google to adopt it.
        • SoftwareMaven 16y ago
          The only way to do that would be for a competitor to implement it and begin gaining traction because of it. Right now, the cost of the wrongfully terminated is less than the cost of wrongfully terminating them and probably always will be unless Google starts loosing people afraid of being wrongfully terminated. That number becomes much larger. Want to incentivize Google? Convince Bing to implement it and see if Adsense customers convert as a result. If I felt Bing was treating their customers/vendors (ads is a really weird relationship :) better, I would consider using it (since as a search product it has approached Google pretty close).
          • rbanffy 16y ago
            The problem is that Google's customer is not the site that carries the banners, but the advertiser who wants their banners shown. Unless those gravitate towards an ad network that coincidentally provides better service to site owners, those folks are doubly screwed.
            • dhimes 16y ago
              But Google still needs their sales channel, which is why Bing may be a viable option for this.
        • Matt_Cutts 16y ago
          I won't weigh in on this specific incident because I'm not familiar with the details, plus it's on the ads side, not the search quality side. But I can weigh in on the "make the action exponential" idea. Regarding the steps that the webspam team takes, we take stronger and stronger action as we see repeated violations or violations with more willful or damaging intent. Hidden text might result in a 30 day removal, for instance (and the site can always remove the hidden text and do a reconsideration request before the 30 days is up, of course). But if we see the site repeatedly violating our guidelines or doing worse stuff, then the action is stronger.
    • doki_pen 16y ago
      I think the biggest issue is they don't want a feedback loop where people can "test" the system and find ways to beat it.
    • RP_Joe 16y ago
      Wow maybe this could be a black hat strategy. Find a target and click fraud them until they get banned. Maybe he was a victim of this method. If I relied on Ad-sense, I would be concerned about this.
• mayank 16y ago
  > But instructing your visitors in some way to click on your ads does cross the line. If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those. Outright, criminal fraud is one thing, but I would argue that it's unethical to hold up the funds he has already accrued. Sure, cut him off, but perhaps it's not the best idea to rely on the good intentions of people when you offer cash for clicks.
  • swolchok 16y ago
    > If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those. No, he didn't. A "small botnet" or Tor is not particularly useful to force you to violate the Adsense ToS by telling your visitors to click on your ads.
    • Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
      I think his point is that, if invalid clicks is all it takes for an adsense publisher to get banned, then there is nothing to stop your competition from going onto your site and clicking a lot of your ads or get a botnet to do it and get you banned. If it is a mere algorithm, then it is not unforeseeable, that, due to no fault of your own whatever, but malice of competitors, you can get banned, though, in these cases, I think there would be a good legal argument, not least because the google contract you sign up to is not entirely recognised by some courts, but replaced in many instances by what is or seems reasonable, as, when you sign up to the contract you have no choice but to sign up, thus, there is no equal bargaining power.
      • kjksf 16y ago
        Except in that particular case that's not what happened. He admits he was enticing users to click ads which is clearly against AdSense rules. I'm sure the fraud detection system is not perfect but in this case it actually worked as designed. Yay for Google, boo for people who try to take advantage of the system.
• jdietrich 16y ago
  Also: If a sailor buys a sailing book by entering Amazon via my website, I get a 5 per cent referral fee. If some-one spends $200 on a Kindle or a camera, [they] get their next three month s subscription for free. That's definitely abuse of Amazon's affiliate program and crosses the line from click-fraud-ish to full blown criminal fraud. Aside from being against the terms of their scheme, his clear intention is to induce site visitors to make planned purchases through his affiliate links, something that is obviously completely contrary to the spirit of his agreement with Amazon. The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely scraping by. By cutting him off, Google is losing revenue to protect the integrity of their advertising marketplace. They're doing the decent thing by their advertisers in taking a cheat out of the system. I wholeheartedly support Google in their actions.
  • EGreg 16y ago
    While Google's customers ARE the advertisers and their first priority is to make sure they are protected, Google would sit up and do something if more website PUBLISHERS would complain. It's a business. However, as a practical issue, I fail to see any practical reason to disable the guy's revenue from YouTube videos, based on clicks from an unrelated site. Just stop counting the clicks on the site, Google!
    • gscott 16y ago
      He has control over those youtube videos, he should take them down, create all new accounts with his wifes information and then put up the truck videos and pretty soon youtube will put him back into advertising mix. For his other site, if I were him I would run Adbrite.com ads instead of Adwords ads.
      • anigbrowl 16y ago
        Correct, and it's quite possible that Google is undermining its own interests by presenting such incentives.
• mycroftiv 16y ago
  Doesn't everyone on the internet already know that website operators receive revenue from visitors clicking on ads? I don't comprehend the underlying premise that ad-clickers are supposed to be ignorant of how internet advertising works.
  • anigbrowl 16y ago
    I think this goes to the heart of the issue. The sort of fraud ad brokers want to avoid is 'www.fraud-u-lent.com: Hey visitors! click on 10 of these ads and get FREE warez/porn/iPad/car for every 10 clix!!' On the other hand, there's a legitimate conversation that goes along the lines of '[niche site] is great! how do you manage to provide us with so much great content for our [niche hobby]?' 'Oh thanks, I have been a [niche hobbyist] for 20 years, and accumulated a lot of [niche content/skill]. Also those ads at the side of the page help support the project so you can enjoy it for free.' The second is technically violating any ad agreement that prohibits click invitations, but in a vastly different way from the first example. An overly mechanical or aggressive interpretation is throwing the baby out with the bath water, and if it becomes too common it will become (or perhaps already is) an opportunity for a competitor.
  • kjksf 16y ago
    Clearly not everyone on the internet acts on that knowledge which is why frequently asking people visiting your website to click on ads does increase the number of (unfortunately worthless to the advertiser) clicks. Google doesn't prevent you from discussing how AdSense works in general. What you cannot do is to specifically ask people to click on ads on your website. The underlaying premise is not that people are ignorant but that they will do the things you ask them to do.
  • dedward 16y ago
    They want the website itself to NOT suggest in any way that people should click on AdSense ads. They want people to do it naturally, of their own accord - so their algorithms (googles) can handle ad placement and whatnot. It's not the same as me buying an ad on your site and encouraing traffic.. it's not an affiliate sales program.. it's a very specific advertising setup that very clearly states you are not to encourage people to click on the ads.
• anigbrowl 16y ago
  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 easily as it can support good guys, but the approach Google has taken creates a greater incentive for the guy to pull his old material and create a new online identity than it does for him to correct the minor flaw in his marketing. It's easy to say 'don't ever encourage users to click on ads,' but half the appeal of niche sites like this to members is being able to have conversational contact with an individual whose work is especially admirable, or through which the member can live vicariously. What's happening here is that a legitimate honest business model (subscriber sales for niche content, with a minor secondary revenue stream from ads) is being punished because of Google's inability to differentiate it from a dishonest business model. The huge fear you describe is a reflection of both the asymmetry between Google and the small advertiser, and of the difficulty in understanding exactly what behavior is in or out. Not everyone finds those contracts easy to read or understand, and Google is actually raising barriers to entry if it enforces them too rigidly and giving greater incentive to the black hats than the white hats. I strongly suspect that this is a limiting factor on Google's own revenue, which is stuck on a local maximum because Google itself is has a much lower tolerance for information asymmetry than it demands of its content providers.
  • kjksf 16y ago
    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 rule is crystal clear and simple: don't encourage users to click on ads they otherwise wouldn't. By definition every such click is fraudulent because the user wouldn't otherwise perform it. Google (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot implement more subtle rules (that weight factors like how many times someone did it, how often does he do it, how subtle the encouragement is, how many kids he has to support) in a scalable way. Google couldn't even apply more subtle rules in a consistent way, giving fraudsters even more weapon in what is a PR game (take all the ample, emotional justification from the above post AND allow that fraudster to point to other people who are doing similar things but Google hasn't taken action against them because some fallible person applied a different subtle standard for what fraud is than some other fallible person). As this thread demonstrates, there's plenty of people willing to sympathise with the fraudster despite clear, self-admitted evidence of wrongdoing based purely on his self-professed (hence extremely biased) version of how good of a person he is and how good intentions were and how badly he was treated by big, cold Google. Emotion can trump facts.
• julian37 16y ago
  "Please visit our sponsors" and "please visit our advertisers" are phrases that I've seen very often on the Internet (Google Search has 18m and 750m results for these phrases, respectively.) I'm curious, do many of these sites use a different vendor than AdSense or are breaches of this term quite common?
  • kjksf 16y ago
    There's a difference between AdSense scheme and a sponsor or advertiser if they pay a fixed sponsorship fee or fixed fee for the ad. In that scenario, every additional click, even if of decreasing marginal utility, is a win for the advertiser and the publisher is making them a favor by sending as much traffic as they can. For Google AdSense and other programs based on pay-per-click scheme, advertiser pays for each click so worthless clicks do cost them money and benefit the publisher. That's why it's fraud. There is a strong incentive for one side (publisher) to take advantage of the other side (advertiser) and if allowed to exist on scale, would harm the whole marketplace. The phrasing you used suggest fixed scheme. If it is used in the context of pay-per-click scheme, then yes, it does violate the agreement and I doubt there's any pay-per-click scheme that doesn't ban such behavior.
• aznnico 16y ago
  This is somewhat irrelevant. Google says in the TOS to not do that, but they don't ban on that alone. What you get banned for is based on data. Everytime they ban someone, they want enough evidence, so if it ever went to court, they don't look foolish. You can have no effect, or even some when asking people to click. You have to break thresholds to actually get banned. And even if there were some users egregiously 'supporting' the site, the people can overlook that and just deduct from the account. To get automatically banned means you broke some nasty thresholds.
• LiveTheDream 16y ago
  He's generating revenue via a subscription, so that's an alternative to AdSense already (or supplement, as it were). Luckily there are other ad networks, and the ability to sell ads directly (which he is already doing) as a way to generate more income on the website. As far as the videos on YouTube though, I agree there is not much alternative because of the sheer size and reach of YouTube.
• cosmicray 16y ago
  > The problem is, there's no great alternative. Always remember, Google (by themselves) lives and dies based on original content. Google supplies very little OC (other than perhaps Google Maps). The millions and millions of sites that present themselves at the doorstep of AdSense are seeking a quick and painless way of funding themselves. These same site are providing the OC that supports AdSense (while others provide the advertising spends). Google is the switchboard between the OC and the advertisers. I see no particular impediment (other than Google's size) preventing another from entering the same type of market.