18 ms·

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdo

by _imba_ 6y ago

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresenting ourselves or a product with no details on what we did wrong. We went through the T&C's in some detail and we think we did everything they asked, and we have no idea what we didn't do well enough. We also checked in with every single client and we had near perfect scores on trust pilot, I can't recall a single incident with a client. We've been contacting Google almost daily but almost never been able to find a human to talk to. Through unofficial channels we've found a few people in Goolge but whenever they gave us any advice on what to do it's always "off the record" or "you didn't hear it from me". Something is very rotten. There are always replies on here about not betting your entire business on Google. Google shopping gives 2 orders of mag better conversion than any other channel we tried. For search-to-buy there really just aren't any alternatives and if Google decides to lock you out your business is basically dead. Lucky for us it was a side hustle. Here in Africa e-bay and Amazon aren't options. More scary, since then we've found TONS of businesses in our country who have suffered the same fate in the last month, and many are well-established, popular businesses now facing existential threat. It's incredibly scary that Google's moderation bots can be a single point of failure for a business employing 20+ people.

varispeed 6y ago
I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my posts after I stopped buying ads. I had tens of thousands of followers but content they shared would never reach their friends after I was no longer a paying customer. Pretty shady stuff). I decided to not contact neither Google nor Facebook about this, because I was worried they will ban me and I needed access to GMail and Facebook (to talk with family). I really hope these companies get properly investigated, because they have unregulated power of altering the markets to their favour. This power should only be reserved to governments and if Google or Facebook are so big, they need to be divided and their business space heavily regulated.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more. If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.
  - tifadg1 6y ago
    So you're saying he was smart enough to grow this revenue to 2000/month, but, in the meantime forgetting something that basic - and the system caught up with him? If so where was the system before?
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      There have been big swings in advertiser behaviour in the last few years. One big advertiser changes their policy to "no longer include sites about LGBT issues", and suddenly a blog about that could see revenue drop 90%.
      - hedora 6y ago
        In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space. Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT. It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society. Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.
        gitweb 6y ago
        Should it also be a requirement for the government to posts what preferences you look for in a partner on dating websites, what gender you prefer when searching for doctors, what race you prefer when looking for cleaning or child care assistance?
dheera 6y ago
I once created a location-based file sharing web app [0] to simplify sharing non-sensitive content with people nearby, e.g. sharing slides for a public presentation with a room full of people. Anyone nearby just had to go to http://quack.space http://quack.space -- no funny long URLs. I never monetized it, but it got quite a few users and I definitely could have started a path to monetization. I had ideas, such as incorporating location-based ads. Unfortunately Chrome decided at one point it was malware for some reason. I have no idea why. On the backend I had a 1-hour time limit on files and didn't store either files or location data beyond that. Chrome would throw up a malware warning whenever someone visited the page, and that was pretty much the end of the project. It's frustrating that they play gatekeepers to the internet, and they don't even have a fair arbitration process. They should have at least made efforts to contact the owner of the website. This should be downright illegal. [0] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quack-space https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quack-space
- LorenPechtel 6y ago
  I suspect it was basically legit--somebody used it to try to spread malware, their spider found it.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Exactly. The service was used to distribute malware and it got blocked by google and co. There was a similar story last month about someone running a URL shortener. It started being used to obfuscate links to porn and scams. Then it got blocked by twitter/facebook and that's the end of the road for the service.
  - hedora 6y ago
    How is blocking an application because of the actions of one user “legit”? If their spider were treating sites fairly, it’d also block google search, and the chrome team wouldn’t budge on the decision even though the rest of the company collapsed. I hope the anti trust investigators focus on these sorts of instead of some trivially-bypassed thing, like bundling. After the botched MS antitrust suit, I’m not holding my breath.
Covzire 6y ago
I wonder how vulnerable Google's practices are to corruption. Say you've got your new business on the up swing and one of your competitors has a friend at Google who they offer a bribe to shut down your entire business, at least for a few weeks under dubious or non existent reasons. Seems like an extremely easy way to make copious amounts of shady cash if you've got that magic ban button at Google.
- piyh 6y ago
  I'd imagine the average googler isn't going to be easily bribed compared to the alternative of finding some darknet service to figure out how to trigger an automatic ban by uploading malware to the site.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    It would be lower wage support staff probably in in the USA not highly paid SV engineers. Its the same in the UK where I used to work (British Telecom) criminals used to approach call centre workers to get info.
ckocagil 6y ago
If this isn't evidence of a monopoly, I don't know what is.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Well, maybe monopoly in east Africa, but that's hardly surprising given the difficulty of doing business there.
  - _imba_ 6y ago
    I don't think this is quite fair. I'm from South Africa, hardly a backwater. It's a problem anywhere where people mostly search to buy on Google. In the western world it is anywhere Amazon has local 3rd party sellers and relevant adopted user behaviour. Many places don't have that to the point where it's a real alternative to Google for search-to-buy(I don't know the real term to describe this behaviour) ads.
- happymellon 6y ago
  The evidence of a monopoly is zero support for these services.
robomartin 6y ago
This, I think, is one of the most important things legislators need to look at going forward as they dig into the practices of companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. The massive paradigm shift that occurred once these companies grabbed prominence in commerce is to go from a system where humans interacted with humans in business-to-business commerce to solve problems to a cold, hard, heartless and decidedly dangerous totalitarian algo-driven relationship. In "the old days", if a publisher had a problem with an ad from advertiser they would contact them to discuss, let them know what the issue might have been and seek resolution for mutual benefit. I other words, adults doing business with adults. Not so with these companies. They are brutal and cold and have no problem destroying any business at any time for any reason. I have seen this happen to acquaintances enough times on these platforms to be absolutely astounded that we haven't yet seen the mother of all class-action lawsuits. And it would be a big one. I know people who have gone from having nice lifestyle businesses to loosing virtually all due to one of these platforms suspending their account with no explanation, no conversation and no recourse whatsoever. One day you are putting food on your table and taking care of your kids and the next Monday at 7:00 AM you are on your way to losing it all. I've said this many times, I am definitely not for the government having their hands on everything. No way. However, this, to me, has become a situation where government needs to become involved ASAP. It isn't getting any better. We need legislators to exercise judicious control over some of these practices. These company have such command of the marketplace that if they suspend or ban someone they might as well not exist. That kind of power should not be allowed to be wielded as capriciously as these companies seem to have been doing for years. I do understand that fraud and other issue are a reality of these businesses. Well, they need to figure out how to deal with that while, at the same time, being human and human in their treatment of those who depend on the access they provide for legitimate work.
- politician 6y ago
  Another way of saying it is that such businesses have become governments unto themselves. Your account is your passport.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  Taking the meta-view: the cynical take is that you only care because you and people you know are in the crosshairs. If you feel that there's a role for government here, perhaps you should be more considerate of a role for government in areas you'd previously thought it unwarranted; clearly, it's impossible for any one person to have personal experience for all the ways people can be screwed over, and for which the only real recourse is intervention by the public-at-large (i.e., the government, at least in a representative democracy). There's always a bigger fish, you just met yours. I'm all for serious reform (and even dissolution) at Google et al., but I also don't think everything will be hunky-dory just because America's entrepreurial upper middle class gets their satisfaction. While we're swinging the antitrust hammer, might want to take a look at retail and gig "employers" too.
reaperducer 6y ago
Google shopping gives 2 orders of mag better conversion than any other channel we tried Until it doesn't. All businesses should have a disaster plan.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
On youtube at least, competitors can flag videos as ‘ungood’ in a number of ways (copyright, hate speech, NSFW, etc.) to entangle their competitors in bureaucracy.
- pembrook 6y ago
  Not just YouTube. One of my competitors spent thousands of dollars on AdWords to send traffic to my site with an ad for something completely unrelated. This of course led to bounce rates of 99%+ for all of this traffic, which dramatically increased my bounce rate overall. As far as I can tell, Google used this as a signal that my site was a shady/scam site and removed me from the search pages I used to rank on entirely. Took nearly 6 months to figure out the problem, and where all this phantom AdWords traffic was coming from.
justiceforsaas 6y ago
A good business will ALWAYS try to diversify their acquisition channels. I've analyzed/interviewed 400+ founders and what channels they use to get to (paying) customers [1] and this is a pattern I've noticed across successful founders. Google Shopping is just 1 channel through which you could get customers. Since you're in Africa, my guess is that SEO is WAY easier than US/Canada, so that's a viable channel. Lack of ebay/amazons in Africa is an opportunity, because you don't have them dominating the top 10 SERPs. I could go on and on and on... [1] https://firstpayingusers.com https://firstpayingusers.com
- _imba_ 6y ago
  Yes, we're doing all obvious advertising channels, and have some cash to put behind it. Dominating SERPS with very little effort since we're doing long tail. Our particular long tail means people are searching for very particular terms and buying the single item they are looking for, with this behaviour the business seems very viable(and exciting) by the growth google shopping gives. All other channels combined are very slow in comparison. We're continuing trying to optimise those in the meantime. But we've learnt the newish(around here, at least) advantage Google shopping (and amazon search, probably) gives in insane compared to the typical alternatives.
Yhippa 6y ago
> selling some hard-to-get long tail items Was there anything potentially illegal or sketchy about this?
- _imba_ 6y ago
  No nothing dodgy at all. Whatever we did wrong it isn't obvious.
deepender99 6y ago
https://console.developers.google.com/tos?id=androidpublisher https://console.developers.google.com/tos?id=androidpublishe... Google Updated it's Terms of Service. On 3 Nov 2020 Please read terms of Api.
eternalban 6y ago
You will be delighted to know that Google is one of the tech giants tasked with contact tracing for Covid.

by _imba_ 6y ago

varispeed 6y ago

I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my posts after I stopped buying ads. I had tens of thousands of followers but content they shared would never reach their friends after I was no longer a paying customer. Pretty shady stuff). I decided to not contact neither Google nor Facebook about this, because I was worried they will ban me and I needed access to GMail and Facebook (to talk with family). I really hope these companies get properly investigated, because they have unregulated power of altering the markets to their favour. This power should only be reserved to governments and if Google or Facebook are so big, they need to be divided and their business space heavily regulated.

londons_explore 6y ago
I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more. If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.
- tifadg1 6y ago
  So you're saying he was smart enough to grow this revenue to 2000/month, but, in the meantime forgetting something that basic - and the system caught up with him? If so where was the system before?
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    There have been big swings in advertiser behaviour in the last few years. One big advertiser changes their policy to "no longer include sites about LGBT issues", and suddenly a blog about that could see revenue drop 90%.
    - hedora 6y ago
      In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space. Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT. It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society. Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.
      - gitweb 6y ago
        Should it also be a requirement for the government to posts what preferences you look for in a partner on dating websites, what gender you prefer when searching for doctors, what race you prefer when looking for cleaning or child care assistance?

dheera 6y ago

I once created a location-based file sharing web app [0] to simplify sharing non-sensitive content with people nearby, e.g. sharing slides for a public presentation with a room full of people. Anyone nearby just had to go to http://quack.space http://quack.space -- no funny long URLs. I never monetized it, but it got quite a few users and I definitely could have started a path to monetization. I had ideas, such as incorporating location-based ads. Unfortunately Chrome decided at one point it was malware for some reason. I have no idea why. On the backend I had a 1-hour time limit on files and didn't store either files or location data beyond that. Chrome would throw up a malware warning whenever someone visited the page, and that was pretty much the end of the project. It's frustrating that they play gatekeepers to the internet, and they don't even have a fair arbitration process. They should have at least made efforts to contact the owner of the website. This should be downright illegal. [0] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quack-space https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quack-space

LorenPechtel 6y ago
I suspect it was basically legit--somebody used it to try to spread malware, their spider found it.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Exactly. The service was used to distribute malware and it got blocked by google and co. There was a similar story last month about someone running a URL shortener. It started being used to obfuscate links to porn and scams. Then it got blocked by twitter/facebook and that's the end of the road for the service.
- hedora 6y ago
  How is blocking an application because of the actions of one user “legit”? If their spider were treating sites fairly, it’d also block google search, and the chrome team wouldn’t budge on the decision even though the rest of the company collapsed. I hope the anti trust investigators focus on these sorts of instead of some trivially-bypassed thing, like bundling. After the botched MS antitrust suit, I’m not holding my breath.

Covzire 6y ago

I wonder how vulnerable Google's practices are to corruption. Say you've got your new business on the up swing and one of your competitors has a friend at Google who they offer a bribe to shut down your entire business, at least for a few weeks under dubious or non existent reasons. Seems like an extremely easy way to make copious amounts of shady cash if you've got that magic ban button at Google.

piyh 6y ago
I'd imagine the average googler isn't going to be easily bribed compared to the alternative of finding some darknet service to figure out how to trigger an automatic ban by uploading malware to the site.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  It would be lower wage support staff probably in in the USA not highly paid SV engineers. Its the same in the UK where I used to work (British Telecom) criminals used to approach call centre workers to get info.

ckocagil 6y ago

If this isn't evidence of a monopoly, I don't know what is.

thu2111 6y ago
Well, maybe monopoly in east Africa, but that's hardly surprising given the difficulty of doing business there.
- _imba_ 6y ago
  I don't think this is quite fair. I'm from South Africa, hardly a backwater. It's a problem anywhere where people mostly search to buy on Google. In the western world it is anywhere Amazon has local 3rd party sellers and relevant adopted user behaviour. Many places don't have that to the point where it's a real alternative to Google for search-to-buy(I don't know the real term to describe this behaviour) ads.
happymellon 6y ago
The evidence of a monopoly is zero support for these services.

robomartin 6y ago

This, I think, is one of the most important things legislators need to look at going forward as they dig into the practices of companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. The massive paradigm shift that occurred once these companies grabbed prominence in commerce is to go from a system where humans interacted with humans in business-to-business commerce to solve problems to a cold, hard, heartless and decidedly dangerous totalitarian algo-driven relationship. In "the old days", if a publisher had a problem with an ad from advertiser they would contact them to discuss, let them know what the issue might have been and seek resolution for mutual benefit. I other words, adults doing business with adults. Not so with these companies. They are brutal and cold and have no problem destroying any business at any time for any reason. I have seen this happen to acquaintances enough times on these platforms to be absolutely astounded that we haven't yet seen the mother of all class-action lawsuits. And it would be a big one. I know people who have gone from having nice lifestyle businesses to loosing virtually all due to one of these platforms suspending their account with no explanation, no conversation and no recourse whatsoever. One day you are putting food on your table and taking care of your kids and the next Monday at 7:00 AM you are on your way to losing it all. I've said this many times, I am definitely not for the government having their hands on everything. No way. However, this, to me, has become a situation where government needs to become involved ASAP. It isn't getting any better. We need legislators to exercise judicious control over some of these practices. These company have such command of the marketplace that if they suspend or ban someone they might as well not exist. That kind of power should not be allowed to be wielded as capriciously as these companies seem to have been doing for years. I do understand that fraud and other issue are a reality of these businesses. Well, they need to figure out how to deal with that while, at the same time, being human and human in their treatment of those who depend on the access they provide for legitimate work.

politician 6y ago
Another way of saying it is that such businesses have become governments unto themselves. Your account is your passport.
bsanr2 6y ago
Taking the meta-view: the cynical take is that you only care because you and people you know are in the crosshairs. If you feel that there's a role for government here, perhaps you should be more considerate of a role for government in areas you'd previously thought it unwarranted; clearly, it's impossible for any one person to have personal experience for all the ways people can be screwed over, and for which the only real recourse is intervention by the public-at-large (i.e., the government, at least in a representative democracy). There's always a bigger fish, you just met yours. I'm all for serious reform (and even dissolution) at Google et al., but I also don't think everything will be hunky-dory just because America's entrepreurial upper middle class gets their satisfaction. While we're swinging the antitrust hammer, might want to take a look at retail and gig "employers" too.

reaperducer 6y ago

Google shopping gives 2 orders of mag better conversion than any other channel we tried Until it doesn't. All businesses should have a disaster plan.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

On youtube at least, competitors can flag videos as ‘ungood’ in a number of ways (copyright, hate speech, NSFW, etc.) to entangle their competitors in bureaucracy.

pembrook 6y ago
Not just YouTube. One of my competitors spent thousands of dollars on AdWords to send traffic to my site with an ad for something completely unrelated. This of course led to bounce rates of 99%+ for all of this traffic, which dramatically increased my bounce rate overall. As far as I can tell, Google used this as a signal that my site was a shady/scam site and removed me from the search pages I used to rank on entirely. Took nearly 6 months to figure out the problem, and where all this phantom AdWords traffic was coming from.

justiceforsaas 6y ago

A good business will ALWAYS try to diversify their acquisition channels. I've analyzed/interviewed 400+ founders and what channels they use to get to (paying) customers [1] and this is a pattern I've noticed across successful founders. Google Shopping is just 1 channel through which you could get customers. Since you're in Africa, my guess is that SEO is WAY easier than US/Canada, so that's a viable channel. Lack of ebay/amazons in Africa is an opportunity, because you don't have them dominating the top 10 SERPs. I could go on and on and on... [1] https://firstpayingusers.com https://firstpayingusers.com

_imba_ 6y ago
Yes, we're doing all obvious advertising channels, and have some cash to put behind it. Dominating SERPS with very little effort since we're doing long tail. Our particular long tail means people are searching for very particular terms and buying the single item they are looking for, with this behaviour the business seems very viable(and exciting) by the growth google shopping gives. All other channels combined are very slow in comparison. We're continuing trying to optimise those in the meantime. But we've learnt the newish(around here, at least) advantage Google shopping (and amazon search, probably) gives in insane compared to the typical alternatives.

Yhippa 6y ago

> selling some hard-to-get long tail items Was there anything potentially illegal or sketchy about this?

_imba_ 6y ago
No nothing dodgy at all. Whatever we did wrong it isn't obvious.

deepender99 6y ago

https://console.developers.google.com/tos?id=androidpublisher https://console.developers.google.com/tos?id=androidpublishe... Google Updated it's Terms of Service. On 3 Nov 2020 Please read terms of Api.

eternalban 6y ago

You will be delighted to know that Google is one of the tech giants tasked with contact tracing for Covid.