Let's think about this logically. Google takes 32% of every adsense click [1], so assuming an account makes $5,000/month, Google is making $2,352/month from that account. So by banning the account, they are making $5,000 one-time, and losing $2,352/month forever. No company is stupid enough to do that.<p>However, considering a site making $5,000 or $10,000/month is generating quite a few clicks, I think it makes perfect sense for any account reaching these thresholds to be manually reviewed to ensure they are valid sites. The quality of Google's clicks is one of its main selling points, and by cutting out spammy sites at the source it both improves the quality of its own program and at the same time removes a lot of the financial incentive to run a scummy site.<p>So my guess is these policies (or similar policies that involve manual reviews of sites) make perfect sense, are not illegal in any way, and this whole posting is as bogus as it looks.<p>1: <a href="https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en</a>
Everything about this post strikes me as a conspiracy-laden fake, from the typos to wrong terminology to untrue policies to the lack of specific names of people. I passed this pastebin to the ads side to confirm for sure, but I would treat this as completely untrue.<p>Added: Yup, I'm hearing back from multiple people on the ads side that this is pretty much untrue from start to finish.<p>Also notice that the "rmujica" account that submitted this item has never submitted any other story or written any other comment on Hacker News before today.
It reads like some disgruntled AdSense publishers theory as to why they were banned. Now it is true that in 2009, when the Great Recession hit, Google went through its processes and identified places where controls were lax. And its true that there has always been a lot of abuse of AdSense (it is after all the first thing a neophyte ad-fraud wannabe does, which is create a page, put AdSense ads on it, and then pay a bot-net to click on them. It almost seems like some sort of starter project or tutorial it was so common)<p>I would be surprised though if anyone actually sought out to 'screw' the legitimate advertisers. It is after all Google's bread and butter.
If you are going to sit around and "see what happens" for 3 years, you talk to a lawyer. You gather evidence. Emails, text chats, etc. You audio record meetings and conversations with people (subject to lawyer advice). You collect enough information over a long enough period of time so that an investigator can trivially search a dumped archive of email to verify your claims.<p>But we are supposed to believe someone who offers effectively no evidence from the duration of their claimed tenure, and who pushes it off as "I stayed because I had a family to support, and secondly I wanted to see how far they would go." and identity protection at the level of "such as waiting for the appropriate employee turn around"<p>So... no Hardy Boys level of investigation was performed, no evidence was gathered, no voices were recorded, no text messages were saved, no emails were forwarded, not a single byte was smuggled out on a flash drive nestled in the poster's pocket. Nothing was done to offer even the slightest bit of recording of anything.<p>The poster is either the most pathetic excuse for a whistle blower that I've ever heard, or it's a poor-quality April fool's joke that is 28 days too late.
As a large publisher, we have witnessed both the $10,000 and $5,000 thresholds. It's simply true. We are now using other networks and directly working with advertisers, and our AdSense revenue is $4,500 (total ad revenue is $25,000+/mo). We also quite presciently considered making a PR stink after the first AdSense ban (we were re-instated later), but decided this could tarnish the image of our company and of our product for our clients- AdSense revenue was not important enough.<p>Even though after the initial ban (when we overshot $10,000/mo) we were OK'ed by a contact in their Policy Team and re-instated (a contact we found after a lot of work), EVERY time when we bounced back to $10,000 and then to $5,000 after scaling down, we would have new vague and inane threats from AdSense about our perfectly NORMAL UGC ,as if the initial conversation with their Policy has never taken place.<p>We basically migrated away from AdSense, but if their are ANY SERIOUS LAWYERS here interested in a class action, we have a WEALTH of DETAILED documentation. ANAL, but it's definitely interesting: we have never encountered such a SHITTY treatment by any other company, and we have about 1,500 corporate clients. Once again, we never did anything shady or different than some other publishers that are apparently Green-listed by Google.
Funny; back in 2010 this exact thing happened to a company I worked at. The day before payout (for the <i>previous month</i>) our AdSense account was banned. So we lost 2 months worth of ad revenue. They completely ignored all of our emails and we had to move to another ad provider immediately.
"The new policy was officially called AdSense Quality Control Color Codes (commonly called AQ3C by
employees)."<p>You know, you'd think that if Google had a 2-years-running official policy, some other bit of leakage about it would have occurred by now. Two years is a long time for an official policy on a giant company's largest product to have never even been whispered, in accident, on the Internet before.<p>Let me do a quick search...
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22adsense+quality+control+color+codes%22" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=%22adsense+quality+control+c...</a><p>Nope. Just three instances of Pastebin (Hm, wonder why three?).<p>Oh, I know what I did wrong. I'm using the wrong search engine!<p><a href="http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22adsense+quality+control+color+codes%22" rel="nofollow">http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22adsense+quality+control+colo...</a><p>Hm, nope, only one result there too.<p>Curious.
This doesn't surprise me at all.<p>My account was banned for "invalid activity" in the timeframe mentioned. The automated emails said they wouldn't even tell me what I supposedly did wrong. I tried appealing and only got an automated email telling me my appeal was denied. I was never able to talk to anyone or get any actual details on wrongdoing. A quick search and you'll quickly realize this happened to a lot of people.<p>I had something like $200 sitting in my account, which was obviously forfeited. Before this even happened, I removed ads from my blog (which is where the revenue was earned) because it wasn't performing well enough to justify having ads there anyway.<p>In the end, I didn't really care so much about my forfeited balance - hell, I even volunteered to forfeit it during the appeal if it was in any way associated with invalid activity among other things. The big issue is that this seems to be a lifetime/universal ban. BEFORE WE EVER RAN ADS, an AdSense account with an unrelated corporate tax ID was also banned for "Invalid Activity". The only reason I can conceivably come up with on the ban is that this was also associated with a Google Apps account that I have.<p>I'm a longtime Google shareholder and supporter, but it's times like this when you realize you can't trust "Don't Be Evil" any more. Ironically, I've spent way more in Google Apps + AdWords than I ever earned with AdSense.
If this is such a slam dunk, why not just go directly to the FBI or IRS? I'm sure there are tons of people in those orgs who would LOVE to smash google if they really were behaving in such an illegal manner.<p>It seems a bit more realistic than hoping that they see this pastebin text, and decide to follow up on it, track you down, and get your statements on the record.
As a developer, I have had, and friends have had thier Adsense accounts banned right before payout for legitimate earnings. It hurts so bad to have that happen, and Google gives you little recourse. I cannot speak to the legitimacy of this pastebin, but reading it, it sounds completely plausible. If it walks like a duck...
Making this kind of statements and then not providing any kind of proof is just pointless. No one has any reason to believe any of this and this can't therefore be considered a leak because it carries absolutely no value.
I somehow doubt this is true, but Google has done its fair share to give rise to such rumours.<p>Mostly they have been very opaque on the reasons of account bans, they haven't payed out the remaining balances of banned accounts (even when they presented no proof of any fraud), and finally they haven't provided a working way to appeal any bans.<p>I can understand their decisions, but they do come with the risk of bad PR.
Whilst I've never used adSense much, this does corroborate with chatter in SEO/webmaster forums, especially around 2012.<p>The paragraph on G analytics is also very interesting, it never seems to line up with other tracking tools like Piwik.
I found this part interesting. So the only way to even find out the reason for your account being banned is to hire a lawyer.<p>> A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. The problem was that notifying the
publisher for the reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact
reason must be provided if a legal representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
I am an adsense publisher, never experienced a ban before, however I did get my account deactivated once for a violation.<p>It was like extracting teeth, they would not tell me what it was! It took me 5 days to notice that in an area of my site if hovered over with the mouse an ad would be fractionally covered at the corner (I know, so evil).<p>I addressed the issue and emailed them back to ask if that was the issue sorted now, they thanked me and said it was now sorted, and sent me screenshots of the problem from the past.<p>Google, we are not little stringed puppets, realistically all they had to do was tell me what the problem was (with screenshots they had), and it would've been fixed in under 5 minutes.<p>No, Google apparently doesn't work like the other 99.9% of the population. Are the workers all just sitting around on some massive ego trip? Wondering when daddy is going to bring in a candy floss machine.<p>Put it this way, if Google were seen as a good company these stories would get no attention at all, I think secretly deep down we all think your eViL and we honestly wouldn't put it past you to do something like this.
Hm... something does not compute:<p>> Having signed many documents such as NDA's and non-competes, there are many repercussions for me,
especially in the form of legal retribution from Google.<p>> No one on the outside knows it, if they did, the FBI and possibly IRS would immediately launch an
investigation, because what they are doing is so inherently illegal and they are flying completely under
the radar.<p>Wait, what legal repercussions? If what they're doing is illegal, (1) they probably wouldn't win the lawsuit against you, and (2) more importantly, NDAs don't apply (IANAL, but AFAIK contracts are overruled by law), and he could and should report the crime directly to the police.<p>Unless, of course, s/he has too much to loose from bullying, or if s/he fears Google bought politicians.
The risk/reward here doesn't add up. Taking an extra few thousand a month from publishers isn't worth risking the billions in revenue they make per year.
I got banned from Google Adsense as a teenager (7 years ago). Still regret my stupid decision to try and hack Google Adsense clicks. My account was never restored :(.
Happened to someone I know back in 2005 I think, he lost 2 months of payment, and it was a lot of money. But he had some erotic videos on his website so... mostly his fault.
Why would they take all of your earnings for one month instead of 1/3rd to infinity?<p>That's just dumb.<p>That said, I have noticed AdSense policy enforcement ratcheted up, but protecting the advertisers is in everybody's best long term interests.<p>My experience with AdSense policy enforcers was fair.<p>I preferred having ad units that encouraged unintentional clicking,
I made more money like that,
but I understand why they made me change it.<p>Having made my ads less blended to the site, I have had no issues since.
reocities.com got banned for no reason that I can think of, never bothered to try to engage google on this because it is as good as pointless. Google just simply doesn't care, as long as more people are signing up than they are cancelling they can keep the ship afloat. On the off-chance that you're trying to social engineer them they apparently can't take the risk to re-enable an account.<p>So, I've taken the attitude that google adsense is to be avoided like the plague for anything approaching a business. It's found money if you can get it, and if you can't that shouldn't be a factor in your business plan at all.
Regardless of whether this is true or not, I'd say it's a good rule of thumb when dealing with a Monolith (Google) to expect better treatment when paying them money (AdWords) than when they pay you money (AdSense).
The whole click bombing argument is undoubtedly true, I've seen it happen too many times. Additionally, from my experience, Google will wait until immediately before the payout period to ban. I had $750 waiting to be paid out one month then poof! Three days before the payout my account was banned.<p>I don't know if this guy is telling the truth, but his arguments have truth in them.
If it's an anonymous leak, exposing overt fraud, why would the poster not name names, unless this leak was a fake?<p>> "...fuck the rest" (those words were actually
said by a Google AdSense exec)<p>> there was a "sit-down" from the AdSense division higher ups to talk about new emerging issues
I had my AdSense account and site blocked just before i got to the $5000/month mark.<p>I followed every consideration in the official AdSense blog, ensured that every content policy was met. Appealed with a strong case and got revoked.<p>No official explanation was given even by Google employees I contacted.<p>I see tons of sites with shit content and link building monetize with adsense while ours is loved by 1,000,000 users who spend 12 minutes average and a bounce rate below 6%.<p>Everything on the leak makes total sense to me and we spent so many days implementing stuff to get Google's approval (like image fingerprinting, spam database, porn detection, overseas moderators) to get a shitty robot response with no real explanation.
I'm inclined to believe this, but I'm skeptical of Google Analytics numbers being deflated. Wouldn't people notice the data not being consistent with other tools or their own web server logs?
Though the adsense is best possible option for monetizing, it seems that they have some UNANSWERED question raising every time.<p>I am an old adsense publisher and serving adsense ads on my sites since last three years but it is becoming a bit difficult to cope with their Terms and services.<p>They have disabled ad serving on my few real MONEY MAKING sites only because my site was having one Google trademarked WORD in URL. ( I don't know how do they understand this as violation of TOS after three years of ad serving.)<p>If we look in to this policy of adsense which says do not use Google trademarked WORD in URL then almost all possible site that is dedicated to TECH news is violating this rule because they all writes news about Google, Youtube, Adsense, Gmail, Google Drive, Blogspot etc and all of them are registered trademarks of Google. These tech news sites DO HAVE GOOGLE RELATED WORDS IN THERE URL and violating this rule.<p>Google does not disables such huge site only because they are so called AUTHORITIES????<p>This thing is really getting suspicious.
I did enough ad buying from AdWords and dealt with the changeover to "Quality Score" to know that Google cares a lot about raising their ad rates, but not having the perception of doing so.<p>The same goes with things relating to SEO and since AdSense sits at the intersection between SEO and AdWords, it is not at all surprising that some managers at Google would use the guise of "quality" to juice their numbers.<p>I don't know if it's true or not, but the story certainly lines up with my experiences with Google over the years unfortunately.<p>They deal with a lot of spammers and scammers, which is a legitimately difficult job, but they also are a giant megacorp out to make a buck, and that doesn't always mean they do the right thing.<p>Mostly I bet this gets swept under the rug and isn't investigated, which is a shame.
As a security researcher I can confirm the existence of bullet-proof AdSense accounts mentioned in the leak.<p>There are some big accounts which can break TOS not being banned.<p>For example, localmoxie.com, a high traffic[1] malware[2] site uses AdSence [3].<p>1: <a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/localmoxie.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/localmoxie.com</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?num=100&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&filter=0&q=localmoxie.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?num=100&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&safe...</a><p>3. Jan 2014 <a href="http://archive.today/jsfNy" rel="nofollow">http://archive.today/jsfNy</a> Apr 2014 <a href="http://archive.today/AkpoO" rel="nofollow">http://archive.today/AkpoO</a>
Former Adsense PM here.
It sounds implausible but there were certainly lots of shady accounts from emerging markets. I could see them ratcheting up enforcement on questionable sites from those markets surely but not at this level of randomness cited here.
"Don't be evil"<p>It is a beautiful peace of rhetoric. Yet I wonder, about its effectiveness/achievement inside Google in last 5 years since its inception.<p>Perhaps its because, don't be evil translates to, a middle ground always. Its almost like trying to keep your company on 0-loss/0-profit. That is not a great place to be, because you fall from grace easily.<p>"Be more good than evil" anyone?
This makes me think of the HN link yesterday about identifying businesses that are doomed to fail because the only way they can sustain themselves is moving into new markets. If Google keeps on banning publishers from hosting AdSense ads in order to keep the AdSense money, that's the same dangerous behavior that's indicative of an unsustainable business. The question becomes can they sustain the growth and movement? Are there enough new publishers for Google to sign up to replace the ones they arbitrarily ban or will they eventually start having a hard time finding publishers and web properties?
People should really stop using pastebin to post leaks, I'm pretty sure there's still a timing-based SQL injection to get at least the user's IP
GOOG around 520 for day of the leak: <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=GOOG+Interactive#symbol=GOOG;range=1m" rel="nofollow">http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=GOOG+Interactive#symbol=G...</a><p>Lets wait how market will react.