$11M settlement reached with Google regarding terminated AdSense accounts

When I was in college I had a website that I ran google ads on. I let a balance build up over time so I could use the money to buy school books. When I attempted to cash out Google (which up until that time had no problem profiting off of my site) decided that I was part of a clickfraud ring and refused to pay out the money. There was no way to appeal.<p>Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won&#x27;t touch Google&#x27;s Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.

This one still stings, even though it was years ago. I built and ran a mobile sports news application, we amassed millions of users and were written up in several publications.<p>One day our AdSense account was disabled, no warning, no nothing. We had never resorted to a single &#x27;trick&#x27; or &#x27;hack&#x27;. Nobody at Google could even tell us what exactly we were supposedly accused of.<p>After months of escalation, the final word was &quot;we cannot tell you what you have allegedly done, we will not re-instate your account, you may not appeal any further&quot;.

This was years ago for me, but as bad as it is losing the amount earned, it was just the lack of response when trying to understand why you were terminated. I had no idea why I was banned. I didn&#x27;t employ any shady tricks. The only thing I noticed in the few weeks prior to the account banned was a higher CTR.<p>I actually emailed Adsense support at that time to let them know that it was out of the ordinary for my site.<p>Additionally, I also had an account on the CPA affiliate side of things with the same account that was banned because it was tied with the Adsense email account.

I get the &quot;We think your business is a scam and so we are terminating our relationship&quot; but I don&#x27;t understand why &quot;... and we&#x27;ll keep the money.&quot; doesn&#x27;t result in criminal charges.

I worked in advertising and I saw how scared AdSense publishers constantly were of getting banned by Google. I understand that Google has to defend their business, but some times they were really harsh on things that were debatable grey areas. I always thought that Google was just needlessly giving itself a bad reputation as a business partner.<p>$11M is about 1 hr of Google&#x27;s revenue (365 x 24 x 11&#x2F;100000 = 0.96)<p>EDIT: This actually reminded me of that post a few days ago on HN, about the guy comparing foxes and racoons with some companies in the financial industry, and how some could be winning at the game but losing at the meta-game. Google should be more careful with its meta-game.

I&#x27;ve had friends that have lost $100k+ due to Adsense terminations on legitimate sites. I&#x27;ve personally lost about $10k. We&#x27;ll see how much I actually get paid out from this class action (I think I read that they cap it at $5k)

Years ago I tried to start a small side business on Youtube. I filmed and edited a dozen or so videos with great effort, and hid them until we could launch. While we were polishing things one of the guys that was working with me clicked on an ad, I believe twice. It was for a car or something and it was worth about $12 total. I almost immediately saw it on our account, and figured out what happened. I tried to disown those clicks and that revenue, but there was no way to do it and there was nothing I could do. It was obviously not a genuine users click because no one was watching our videos yet, and I&#x27;m sure the guy&#x27;s account was associated to our project.<p>Sure enough, a few weeks later we were perma-banned from adsense. Destroyed all hope for my business. At no point did we get to communicate with a live person. Fortunately I had set up an LLC and used the Federal Tax ID from the company instead of my own SSN or I would have basically been blackballed from internet advertising forever. I disputed it, owning up to what happened and explaining how I couldn&#x27;t undo it. The robo-response was that my dispute had been rejected, ban was permanent.<p>I bet this destroyed so many people&#x27;s hopes and hard work over the years. When you have a million followers, it will take serious fraud to cause a problem. When you are a nobody starting out, figuring things out for the first time, you make one mistake and you are done forever. I realized that if anyone didn&#x27;t like a less popular uploader they could just make a new account, and click on their ads until they got banned. Pretty horrible.<p>I haven&#x27;t been involved with adsense since, but if they don&#x27;t provide the ability to disown clicks they should add that. There is a lot of testing that goes on when you are building a product.

Seems most people here had the same experience. I do not understand why their practices are not actually illegal. We sent them tons of traffic (aka money to them) and they just terminated without any explanation or recourse. 11M sounds very low; we had a small company and we already lost several $100k.

Frankly, the amount of power Google holds over small businesses is terrifying. It&#x27;s incredible that a small bug in one of Google&#x27;s algorithms could destroy your main source of income, with no explanation or recourse.

I had a 12-months old AdSense account with 300 GBP to withdraw. After I tried to cash out, Google banned the account for click fraud. If they were able to detect it, why didnt didn’t they do it on-the-fly and show my actual balance? This happened 10 years ago. Since then I was pretty sure Google is running a massive scam on the long-tail small publishers. Glad to know at least in US they lost a case...

Almost everyone involved in content creation and tech has a story about being kicked from Google Adsense.<p>What sucked about Google Adsense doing this is everyone started using Google, then got big and they killed off smaller web ad networks. Then they ripped the rug from under content creators that chose them where they cut them off.<p>It was a bad move, I sometimes think it was a big data move only to get people&#x27;s personal information and get free tracking across the web of user activity.<p>It was definitely evil and the brick wall they setup for clarification was unnecessary and very cold.

Back in the early 2000s I ran Google ads, back when they were only text and small boxes. You had to earn $100 to get a payout I think, and after forever I still had like $12. I forgot about it and eventually pulled the ads. In 2011 I sold the domain to some Irish company that gave me $10k USD for it. ... kinda regret it now.<p>It looks like I have the same Google account (found the old e-mails for adsense on that domain) even though I have nothing listed under adsense right now.<p>I no longer run ads on any of my sites and probably never will, but it would be nice to get that fucking $12 for letting Google run all those text ads for those years.

My first respsonce was, that&#x27;s it? Even personal injury lawsuits get bigger verdicts than that, and this involves actual businesses and thousands of people. The lawyers and other fees will eat much of that. No wonder google does not have to worry and can act with impunity .

I had an adsense account to profit from an IP address i randomly purchased from an ISP, which was formerly apparently a somewhat popular porn site. Racked up about $950 in a month, then they turned me off, something about violating terms etc etc.<p>It was a glorified 404 page with a google search widget &amp; adsense ads on it.

11 million distributed around is going to be close to nothing on a per-publisher basis. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if the spread was more than 100 to 1 on owed vs collected. (so if you lost 100k from a terminated adsense account, I doubt you would even get 1k from this settlement)

Google ads where for the little guys, those small blogs, and personal web pages, with only a few thousands visitors&#x2F;months. And you earned just as much as the big guys per user. Now it&#x27;s only for the big guys, good luck earning anything if you have less then 10,000 monthly visitors. And it&#x27;s the same for advertisers, good luck getting any clicks on your ads (99% of clicks are bots) if your budget is less then $10,000. When more and more people start to use ad blockers, there will only be bots left. There&#x27;s more money then ever in advertising. But you need to be <i>big</i> in order to see any of it. I guess Google have tried to fight the bots, but it&#x27;s an impossible battle with too many false positives, and small guys losing their hard earned ad money. I guess Google is too big to notice, they are one of the big guys, and they always get their share. I hope they go back to non intrusive text ads, show some love for the small guys, and kill the bot. Maybe add &quot;captcha&quot; to ads after you click them !? They need to do something drastic or their whole ad based business might crumble from beneath.

When ever I read stories about adsense providers behaving like this, or even &quot;banks&quot; like paypal just closing accounts without any legal security whatsoever, or Websites themself selling user data and serving malware, I always think of situation Warez sites and their users were in a decade ago.<p>Sure, If you visited specific Warez sites, you could assume that the Ads served will likely infect your machine. And sure, the guys running the websites might not be able to cash out the ad revenue.<p>But the realization, that a lot of legit businesses today are in the same situation as sites who were run from shady servers in &quot;digital no mans land&quot; by guys concerned that some kind of law enforcement might ask who owns the site is either funny or deeply disturbing.

So many stories of people who had their account terminated.

<i>&gt; Payments to each of the Class Representatives, not to exceed $5,000 each, as compensation for their active participation in the case on behalf of the Settlement Class;</i><p>$11M payout for possibly thousands of publishers is pennies.

Amazon stole about 2k from me in an affiliate account, rejected appeals. Someone should file a class action against them too, not worth it for me to do it alone.

A google search for &quot; Free Range Content, &quot; shows nothing. They probably went out of business due to being banned.

Is the notice pdf text near-unreadable for anyone else or is it just pdf.js being messy? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adsensepublishersettlement.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;notice.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adsensepublishersettlement.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;notice.pdf</a>

What the title has to do with the page? I could not find this $11M anything on that page!

$11 million seems astonishingly small given the number of people that have been screwed by Adsense. If myself and one other friend received full payment for our closed accounts, we would consume about 2% of this fund by ourselves.

Why just 2010 to 2018? Mine was terminated back in 2008 with about $500 in it.

Seems like Amazon is learning from Google here... Or did they form a cartel on freezing accounts without any explanation or recourse?

Ugh, yeah this brings back bad memories. Similar to and reminds me of all the PayPal issues in the past as well. What headaches.

Does the settlement also apply to admob? They terminated admob accounts as well.

Sweet. Can we get one for all the Amazon Affiliate accounts as well?

This is quite a one-sided &#x27;settlement&#x27;. I suppose $11M will be enough to pay the &#x27;administrative costs&#x27;. What a joke, &#x27;Hon. Beth Labson Freeman&#x27;. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

That&#x27;ll show em. I wonder if Google even had to move money from anywhere, or if it was fine to pay with profits from part of the day.

Does this also apply to admob?