If too many people generate fake clicks, advertisers will no longer want to place expensive ads with Google. That loss could easily amount to 10 (or even 11) fi

If too many people generate fake clicks, advertisers will no longer want to place expensive ads with Google. That loss could easily amount to 10 (or even 11) figures. Over 90% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Even a slight reduction in that revenue could cost billions. If AdSense is associated with websites that contain copyright-infringing material, Google could find itself on the losing side of a gigantic lawsuit with the MAFIAA. That loss, too, could easily amount to billions. If AdSense is associated with any other kind of content with questionable legality (child porn, hate speech, bomb-making tutorials, etc), there could be similar financial ramifications, or worse, damage to Google's brand. This can also be worth billions. So it might make sense, from a purely financial point of view, to be overly aggressive in banning AdSense users. A few false positives might cost tens of millions of dollars, but that could be the lesser of two evils if the alternative is to let a few false negatives slip by. Edit: As for lack of communication, someone at Google seems to think that letting people know too many details about exactly which page violates which policy would allow the bad guys to work around those policies, leading to more false negatives. Security through obscurity! Similarly, if you ever set up a mail server, you'll quickly realize that Google doesn't let you know exactly what you need to do to get rid of that pesky "via your.hostname.com" message. You could try adding DKIM and cross your fingers, but there's no guarantee. That's an anti-spam & anti-phishing feature, and Google doesn't want spammers and phishers to know its exact policies and algorithms. According to Wikipedia [1], AdSense represents 28% of Google's ad revenue. But unlike ads placed in Google's own pages, Google needs to pay out the majority (~68%) of that revenue to website owners, so AdSense's actual contribution to profit is much lower than that. Google has plenty of other places where they can place ads far more profitably, even if a lot of third-party websites dropped AdSense. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsense