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Banned From Making Money, These YouTubers Share Their Stories

mistercow 14y ago
I'm glad the word is getting out about this. Google's abuse of content creators on AdSense has been going on since before they acquired YouTube. As usual, the only way to make any headway with them is to get some media attention. For anyone considering anything resembling a professional relationship with Google (i.e. you are relying on them for income), make absolutely sure that you have real alternatives that you can move to if/when they screw you. You might think "I'm totally above board here, and have no intention of violating their TOS, so I won't ever have a problem", and you would be wrong. It isn't under your control, so you need to make sure you have a backup plan. In fact, ideally you need to already have non-Google sources of revenue, so that if Google drops you, you aren't left high and dry until you can switch to something else.
- lambda 14y ago
  This applies to more than just Google. Your income should not solely depend on one party, unless you're in an employment relationship with them, which carries with it various sorts of legal and social obligations that are a lot harder to simply end on a whim. Does your revenue depend entirely on being in Apple's good graces, and being dropped from the App Store would end it? Does it depend solely on Google's advertising money? Or even if not solely, if 75% of your revenue comes from one source, it will be game changing if you lose that. This is why monopolies are a bad idea, and duopolies aren't much better. A healthy market will have at least three viable players, with none controlling over 50% of the market, allowing you to diversify and be save from any one of them deciding not to play.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    Isn't this basically an argument against ever creating any iPhone app?
    - lambda 14y ago
      No. It's an argument against having all of your income based on an iPhone app. Now, sure, you might start out on the iPhone; but rather than focusing all of your effort there, once you've got some traction, it might be good to work on porting it to Android, and possibly Windows Phone or Blackberry. Of course, even there, it's mostly a duopoly; I don't think that Windows Phone or Blackberry are really viable platforms at this point, so you are going to have to deal with the duopoly nature of the business for now.
      - graeme 14y ago
        I would add that it's also an argument against being dependent on the income from an iphone app. If your income is from one source, you should default to saving more of it than you would if you had a diversified income base.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      It is a good argument against creating a native iOS app, certainly. If Apple decides to drop you, your app's code is virtually worthless.
  - moepstar 14y ago
    While you're absolutely right, there's still one problem: There aren't much, if any, advertising providers with ads as accepted and unintrusive as Googles AdSense... Not to forget their huge portfolio of ads that will fit almost every context - so yes, AdSense is the go-to provider for most.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Problem is that in some markets (e.g games) you can't really help but be beholden to some large publisher. Whether it be Apple, Steam or MS. You can hedge your risk a little by releasing across multiple platforms but then there is still the risk that one platform in particular accounts for 50%+ of your sales and you could lose that at the drop of a hat.
  - drzaiusapelord 14y ago
    >Your income should not solely depend on one party The networking effect is naturally monopolistic. There aren't any practical alternatives to facebook and youtube. Being kicked from either would be disastrous and neither has to offer an alternate ad network or even need a good reason to get rid of you. I imagine a simple mediation or ombudsman process is all these companies need, but they have no incentive to really make that work. They're still making money hand over fist. From a regulator perspective, these are major issues, especially since we've officially entered the age of the walled garden/centralized store. I don't think this is the kind of thing the free market will magically be able to fix if we sit and our hands and wait. I imagine its going to get worse once MS and other big players start making it much more difficult or impossible to install unsigned software or software from outside their store.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I think if you have a large youtube audience who's loyalty you depend on it would be wise to also have an external website (even a crappy 1 page thing) and link to that in every video. That way even if your videos are deleted you can stick them up somewhere else and link from your site and hopefully at least some of your followers will have bookmarked it.
chimi 14y ago
These stories are getting tired. Google is too big to investigate every single exception to their machine rules. We know. We get it. When you have 100 accounts, you can devote time to every exception. When you have 100,000,000 accounts you can't. You have to automate it and with 100,000,000 accounts there are going to be a lot of exceptions to the rules. Even a failure rate of 0.0001% would be enough to fill that cheap blog poach, I mean post, with examples of failures -- some of which were actually successes. Even at that rate, youtube/google implemented an automated success rate of 99.9999%. Let's get some articles about how they accomplished that. That'd be more interesting than this sensationalist drivel.
- falcolas 14y ago
  Are they too big to provide some basic customer support and an escalation path? Interestingly enough, if they did this, we wouldn't be seeing their .0001% failures either.
  - chimi 14y ago
    They do provide that. That's why accounts were suddenly re-enabled. The advertisers are the customers and customers want to know they are paying for clicks from valid opportunities. Google is handling the customer appropriately by banning those that are committing fraud. If you're my sales guy and you defraud my customers I'm going to fire you too.
    - falcolas 14y ago
      The dozens of HC comments to the opposite aside, here's a quote that sums it up from the original article: > "It is not possible to directly contact Google," he said. "No one will speak with you, and there are no other avenues unless you are friends with someone who works there. Once your appeal is rejected, they will not reply to your emails or speak with you further on the issue (they actually tell you that in the rejection letter). It is essentially a LIFETIME ban for your account. Seems fair, right?" His account was reinstated due to the press coverage, just as many HNers get their accounts back due to the many Googlers who frequent here. That's not what I would define as customer service.
stephengillie 14y ago
This seems like a great way to seriously injure a competitor's ability to conduct business. In a sense, it could be used for a denial of service attack.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Indeed. Mass click fraud (and you don't even need to enlist the services of a botnet; there are Asian companies that will do this for you at a flat rate), YouTube shenanigans such as mass flagging or fake DMCAs (resulting in videos being pulled for significant lengths of time). That's one of Google's primary problems and it will only get worse with popularity - they need better CS.
shocks 14y ago
I was banned from AdSense for a similar reason. When I was 14 I made a flash games/funny videos website, and used AdSense as my only income. I learnt a lot about driving traffic and things just started to pick up - and then I was banned. It later came to my attention that a few friends and (at the time) girlfriend had taken it upon themselves to 'help' me by clicking an ad once a day. Annoying, since I was making about $10 a day from ads. I didn't need help. $10 a day was great for a 14 year old. That was nearly eight years ago. I recently contacted Google about it, and was completely ignored. I understand why, it makes sense for them to protect their business - but it's annoying none the less. I could think of good uses for AdSense right now.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I wonder if this was because your friends were all using the same IP address that you were? If not it would be a great way to sabotage somebody you didn't like.
- Jach 14y ago
  I have nearly the same story as well. (Even contacting Google about it some months ago, they rejected the appeal and you only get one.) It sucks, but whatever I guess, just means I gotta make money with one of the tons of other ways to make money...
- ajross 14y ago
  With all due respect, and I agree that it wasn't your "fault", but your friends were engaging in click fraud, and you admit as much. (I'm not completely sure I'd believe they were doing it just "once" a day, but that's between you guys). What should the response to click fraud be for a $10/day account? They simply can't afford to dedicate a human being to something that small.
  - shocks 14y ago
    Oh, I absolutely agree. What my friends did was wrong, and I fully respect why Google did what they did, I would not have done anything different if I was them. My point is more that it's interesting how easy it is to use this as a DDOS type tactic and it's a shame they don't have better appeal system in place. These days I am sure I could contribute to the AdSense ecosystem in a substantially more positive way.
hinoglu 14y ago
If it's possible to get banned from using adsense just by few persons questionable actions, and if google is too big to answer properly but not that big enough to skip watching even the tiniest "fraudilent" actions, then be it and become big enough to get google's attention by reaching out others in the same position. How would one find the others? Well... http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117 http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117 might work for creating one's own community. Sometimes, the best way to show a structure's flaws is to bring down the structure by abusing those flaws.
noonespecial 14y ago
If you think about it from Google's perspective, its working like its supposed to. Overzealous fans going on click-fests are a problem for Google's customers (the advertisers). Automatically banning that account and showing those ads elsewhere completely solves that problem. Simple load-balancing at work. What more do they need to do?
- ajross 14y ago
  That's what I was thinking reading this. Whether it is due to "overzealous fans" or not, click fraud is click fraud. Google (really any advertising broker) can't make a business out of selling fake "clicks", they have to sell views by real users. There has to be a solution to prevent these clicks from registering, and they picked the easy one.
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  If Google knows the clicks are no good, why do they have to ban the user instead of just voiding the clicks and not giving them any money?
  - chimi 14y ago
    Because they never want to have to deal with the potential problem ever again. They want to move forward and creating a machine moving forward with all the ducks in a row is better than constantly re-evaluating the potential fraudsters -- however small that potential may be. Remember, in this case, Google is the customer and the content provider is the vendor. Google has decided not to be those vendor's customer anymore.
- pkteison 14y ago
  The problem is the wrong person is punished, and the content creator has no recourse, and it nets out worse for everyone. Somebody who used to be rewarded for producing good content no longer is so they stop. Google's content gets worse, advertisers venue for selling their ads gets worse, consumers have less good content to watch. Nobody wins. Would you want me to be able to shut down your business with a relatively simple action for me to take, without you being able to take any recourse, without you even having any relationship with me? It has terrible externalities with seemingly innocent actors, imagine what could be achieved with a bit of malice, as you will find among competitors.
marksaccucci 14y ago
So basically Google has enabled trolls/people with bad intentions to destroy someone's cash flow. This seems ridiculous! That's the one thing I hate about Google...their lack of customer service. Regardless if their service is free, they are making more than enough money to set up a call center or something.
- roc 14y ago
  You'd think if they could identify 'suspicious' clicks, they could just ignore them: don't hold the impressions/clicks against the ad-buyer, don't reward the ad-bearing site operator. Problem solved. If it's an honest misunderstanding: no harm done. If it's a money-making scheme: they'll give up and go elsewhere, guaranteed.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
I'm hoping the staggering lack of concern for proper customer service for any of their products will someday start to affect their bottom line. These stories are not new and seem to be adding up. I'm still confused why they haven't invested in a call center or some type of dedicated customer service for the products they support. It makes absolutely no sense to me.
- jnazario 14y ago
  margins. it doesn't affect them yet so why invest the cost? in fact it will always benefit them until /advertisers/ pull their participation, and they have them covered. you, as the small person showing ads, are so insignificant that they wont listen to these complaints.
jnazario 14y ago
i suffered this several years ago. even had a good friend explore, in person, the team who banned me. no movement, no appeal. my adsense account still shows hundreds of dollars to pay out that they wont. sadly no other easy to launch-with ad tool (e.g. yahoo) for a regular home user with a site can yield much money. they really have a monopoly, and this behavior just screws people. in this scenario, fuck google.

I'm glad the word is getting out about this. Google's abuse of content creators on AdSense has been going on since before they acquired YouTube. As usual, the only way to make any headway with them is to get some media attention. For anyone considering anything resembling a professional relationship with Google (i.e. you are relying on them for income), make absolutely sure that you have real alternatives that you can move to if/when they screw you. You might think "I'm totally above board here, and have no intention of violating their TOS, so I won't ever have a problem", and you would be wrong. It isn't under your control, so you need to make sure you have a backup plan. In fact, ideally you need to already have non-Google sources of revenue, so that if Google drops you, you aren't left high and dry until you can switch to something else.

lambda 14y ago
This applies to more than just Google. Your income should not solely depend on one party, unless you're in an employment relationship with them, which carries with it various sorts of legal and social obligations that are a lot harder to simply end on a whim. Does your revenue depend entirely on being in Apple's good graces, and being dropped from the App Store would end it? Does it depend solely on Google's advertising money? Or even if not solely, if 75% of your revenue comes from one source, it will be game changing if you lose that. This is why monopolies are a bad idea, and duopolies aren't much better. A healthy market will have at least three viable players, with none controlling over 50% of the market, allowing you to diversify and be save from any one of them deciding not to play.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Isn't this basically an argument against ever creating any iPhone app?
  - lambda 14y ago
    No. It's an argument against having all of your income based on an iPhone app. Now, sure, you might start out on the iPhone; but rather than focusing all of your effort there, once you've got some traction, it might be good to work on porting it to Android, and possibly Windows Phone or Blackberry. Of course, even there, it's mostly a duopoly; I don't think that Windows Phone or Blackberry are really viable platforms at this point, so you are going to have to deal with the duopoly nature of the business for now.
    - graeme 14y ago
      I would add that it's also an argument against being dependent on the income from an iphone app. If your income is from one source, you should default to saving more of it than you would if you had a diversified income base.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    It is a good argument against creating a native iOS app, certainly. If Apple decides to drop you, your app's code is virtually worthless.
- moepstar 14y ago
  While you're absolutely right, there's still one problem: There aren't much, if any, advertising providers with ads as accepted and unintrusive as Googles AdSense... Not to forget their huge portfolio of ads that will fit almost every context - so yes, AdSense is the go-to provider for most.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Problem is that in some markets (e.g games) you can't really help but be beholden to some large publisher. Whether it be Apple, Steam or MS. You can hedge your risk a little by releasing across multiple platforms but then there is still the risk that one platform in particular accounts for 50%+ of your sales and you could lose that at the drop of a hat.
- drzaiusapelord 14y ago
  >Your income should not solely depend on one party The networking effect is naturally monopolistic. There aren't any practical alternatives to facebook and youtube. Being kicked from either would be disastrous and neither has to offer an alternate ad network or even need a good reason to get rid of you. I imagine a simple mediation or ombudsman process is all these companies need, but they have no incentive to really make that work. They're still making money hand over fist. From a regulator perspective, these are major issues, especially since we've officially entered the age of the walled garden/centralized store. I don't think this is the kind of thing the free market will magically be able to fix if we sit and our hands and wait. I imagine its going to get worse once MS and other big players start making it much more difficult or impossible to install unsigned software or software from outside their store.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I think if you have a large youtube audience who's loyalty you depend on it would be wise to also have an external website (even a crappy 1 page thing) and link to that in every video. That way even if your videos are deleted you can stick them up somewhere else and link from your site and hopefully at least some of your followers will have bookmarked it.

chimi 14y ago

These stories are getting tired. Google is too big to investigate every single exception to their machine rules. We know. We get it. When you have 100 accounts, you can devote time to every exception. When you have 100,000,000 accounts you can't. You have to automate it and with 100,000,000 accounts there are going to be a lot of exceptions to the rules. Even a failure rate of 0.0001% would be enough to fill that cheap blog poach, I mean post, with examples of failures -- some of which were actually successes. Even at that rate, youtube/google implemented an automated success rate of 99.9999%. Let's get some articles about how they accomplished that. That'd be more interesting than this sensationalist drivel.

falcolas 14y ago
Are they too big to provide some basic customer support and an escalation path? Interestingly enough, if they did this, we wouldn't be seeing their .0001% failures either.
- chimi 14y ago
  They do provide that. That's why accounts were suddenly re-enabled. The advertisers are the customers and customers want to know they are paying for clicks from valid opportunities. Google is handling the customer appropriately by banning those that are committing fraud. If you're my sales guy and you defraud my customers I'm going to fire you too.
  - falcolas 14y ago
    The dozens of HC comments to the opposite aside, here's a quote that sums it up from the original article: > "It is not possible to directly contact Google," he said. "No one will speak with you, and there are no other avenues unless you are friends with someone who works there. Once your appeal is rejected, they will not reply to your emails or speak with you further on the issue (they actually tell you that in the rejection letter). It is essentially a LIFETIME ban for your account. Seems fair, right?" His account was reinstated due to the press coverage, just as many HNers get their accounts back due to the many Googlers who frequent here. That's not what I would define as customer service.

stephengillie 14y ago

This seems like a great way to seriously injure a competitor's ability to conduct business. In a sense, it could be used for a denial of service attack.

Karunamon 14y ago
Indeed. Mass click fraud (and you don't even need to enlist the services of a botnet; there are Asian companies that will do this for you at a flat rate), YouTube shenanigans such as mass flagging or fake DMCAs (resulting in videos being pulled for significant lengths of time). That's one of Google's primary problems and it will only get worse with popularity - they need better CS.

shocks 14y ago

I was banned from AdSense for a similar reason. When I was 14 I made a flash games/funny videos website, and used AdSense as my only income. I learnt a lot about driving traffic and things just started to pick up - and then I was banned. It later came to my attention that a few friends and (at the time) girlfriend had taken it upon themselves to 'help' me by clicking an ad once a day. Annoying, since I was making about $10 a day from ads. I didn't need help. $10 a day was great for a 14 year old. That was nearly eight years ago. I recently contacted Google about it, and was completely ignored. I understand why, it makes sense for them to protect their business - but it's annoying none the less. I could think of good uses for AdSense right now.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I wonder if this was because your friends were all using the same IP address that you were? If not it would be a great way to sabotage somebody you didn't like.
Jach 14y ago
I have nearly the same story as well. (Even contacting Google about it some months ago, they rejected the appeal and you only get one.) It sucks, but whatever I guess, just means I gotta make money with one of the tons of other ways to make money...
ajross 14y ago
With all due respect, and I agree that it wasn't your "fault", but your friends were engaging in click fraud, and you admit as much. (I'm not completely sure I'd believe they were doing it just "once" a day, but that's between you guys). What should the response to click fraud be for a $10/day account? They simply can't afford to dedicate a human being to something that small.
- shocks 14y ago
  Oh, I absolutely agree. What my friends did was wrong, and I fully respect why Google did what they did, I would not have done anything different if I was them. My point is more that it's interesting how easy it is to use this as a DDOS type tactic and it's a shame they don't have better appeal system in place. These days I am sure I could contribute to the AdSense ecosystem in a substantially more positive way.

hinoglu 14y ago

If it's possible to get banned from using adsense just by few persons questionable actions, and if google is too big to answer properly but not that big enough to skip watching even the tiniest "fraudilent" actions, then be it and become big enough to get google's attention by reaching out others in the same position. How would one find the others? Well... http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117 http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117 might work for creating one's own community. Sometimes, the best way to show a structure's flaws is to bring down the structure by abusing those flaws.

noonespecial 14y ago

If you think about it from Google's perspective, its working like its supposed to. Overzealous fans going on click-fests are a problem for Google's customers (the advertisers). Automatically banning that account and showing those ads elsewhere completely solves that problem. Simple load-balancing at work. What more do they need to do?

ajross 14y ago
That's what I was thinking reading this. Whether it is due to "overzealous fans" or not, click fraud is click fraud. Google (really any advertising broker) can't make a business out of selling fake "clicks", they have to sell views by real users. There has to be a solution to prevent these clicks from registering, and they picked the easy one.
RandallBrown 14y ago
If Google knows the clicks are no good, why do they have to ban the user instead of just voiding the clicks and not giving them any money?
- chimi 14y ago
  Because they never want to have to deal with the potential problem ever again. They want to move forward and creating a machine moving forward with all the ducks in a row is better than constantly re-evaluating the potential fraudsters -- however small that potential may be. Remember, in this case, Google is the customer and the content provider is the vendor. Google has decided not to be those vendor's customer anymore.
pkteison 14y ago
The problem is the wrong person is punished, and the content creator has no recourse, and it nets out worse for everyone. Somebody who used to be rewarded for producing good content no longer is so they stop. Google's content gets worse, advertisers venue for selling their ads gets worse, consumers have less good content to watch. Nobody wins. Would you want me to be able to shut down your business with a relatively simple action for me to take, without you being able to take any recourse, without you even having any relationship with me? It has terrible externalities with seemingly innocent actors, imagine what could be achieved with a bit of malice, as you will find among competitors.

marksaccucci 14y ago

So basically Google has enabled trolls/people with bad intentions to destroy someone's cash flow. This seems ridiculous! That's the one thing I hate about Google...their lack of customer service. Regardless if their service is free, they are making more than enough money to set up a call center or something.

roc 14y ago
You'd think if they could identify 'suspicious' clicks, they could just ignore them: don't hold the impressions/clicks against the ad-buyer, don't reward the ad-bearing site operator. Problem solved. If it's an honest misunderstanding: no harm done. If it's a money-making scheme: they'll give up and go elsewhere, guaranteed.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

I'm hoping the staggering lack of concern for proper customer service for any of their products will someday start to affect their bottom line. These stories are not new and seem to be adding up. I'm still confused why they haven't invested in a call center or some type of dedicated customer service for the products they support. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

jnazario 14y ago
margins. it doesn't affect them yet so why invest the cost? in fact it will always benefit them until /advertisers/ pull their participation, and they have them covered. you, as the small person showing ads, are so insignificant that they wont listen to these complaints.

jnazario 14y ago

i suffered this several years ago. even had a good friend explore, in person, the team who banned me. no movement, no appeal. my adsense account still shows hundreds of dollars to pay out that they wont. sadly no other easy to launch-with ad tool (e.g. yahoo) for a regular home user with a site can yield much money. they really have a monopoly, and this behavior just screws people. in this scenario, fuck google.