Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

A few months ago, I tried experimenting with Google ads to drive some traffic to a side project of mine which was basically a chess-over-videochat website. A little more than 40 impressions later, it was taken down for being &quot;in violation of our Google ad policies&quot;. There was never any indication what the violation actually was. I replied and asked several times hoping to get a human to tell me what I had actually done wrong. Instead, they kept sending me an automated email that said, &quot;After reviewing your case and taking your feedback into consideration, we&#x27;ve confirmed that your account was and still is in violation of our Google Ads policies.&quot;<p>They also made it seem like I was some cyber criminal by suggesting that if I tried to create another account, they would automatically take that down too.<p>This is what a monopoly looks like.

It&#x27;s refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently.<p>One thing I don&#x27;t understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article?<p>It seems one could even argue that Google&#x27;s focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn&#x27;t hurt Techdirt in this case.

Isn&#x27;t it funny that Google complains about clickbait while many of there sites&#x2F;apps do exactly that and have gotten worse in the recent years.<p>Like in Gmail Google ads &quot;pretend&quot; to be mails, being exactly formatted like a mail and interleaving! with other mails.<p>(Sure there is a small Ad label but it&#x27;s indisguishable from a mail starting with Ad... in the subject)<p>Similar things can be observed fruit custom page&#x2F;domain search the first many entries looking like search results are actually advertisement pointing to somewhere outside if the domain you search, i.e. definitely not what you want when you do a search explicitly limited to one domain.

This is really ironic considering Techdirt is on Google&#x27;s public policy payroll (via &quot;Copia Institute&quot;) on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kstatic.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;5a1907d78237ab177f4bfbbd3ee71354760419b9c69e03a2610c7ba99427e07a264d199288da7a7025846365c4a0b85ff4016bc2f6e3b9319ed1e980ff8b4cb1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kstatic.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;5a1907d78237ab17...</a><p>I suppose this suggests some manner of &quot;fairness&quot; to Google&#x27;s widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can&#x27;t keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody&#x27;s getting an unfair advantage.

I play this game with Google every month or so when the webmaster console reports some mobile experience issues, but when I do a manual scan, there are no issues. So I mark them as resolved and then there are no issues for the next month or so.

For some reason I read the comments...<p>&quot;Someone who hates you is doing this on purpose&quot; reads one.<p>While I have NO IDEA what that&#x27;s about, it does make me wonder, can people cause trouble for their competition through ad sense by doing things to cause the site to be dropped like this? That comment says it&#x27;s because someone is leaving bad comments on the site, which seems unlikely, but I&#x27;ve read other stories about DMCA abuse or something like that to bring down competing sites or videos or whatever.<p>Can someone abuse some kind of adsense reporting system and cause this to happen?

I think the more correct answer to &quot;Why Are Currently No Ads on Techdirt?&quot; is &quot;Because we put all of our eggs in one basket.&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t build a single point of failure into your revenue stream.<p>There are plenty of alternatives to Google that they should have been using in a smaller way that they could then move into prime position. That way, Techdirt&#x27;s revenue might have been diminished, but not eliminated.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. At least Microsoft had better customer support than Google.

I don&#x27;t know if this is the case with techdirt, but by far the most common reason why sites and domains (for mail) end up getting flagged is because their resources have been hijacked by organized criminals and are being used for crime, unbeknownst to the people who own the domains. So if this ever happens to you your first instinct should be to question your own production security situation, not to assume that Google has gone off the rails.

I&#x27;ve never understood why media companies don&#x27;t treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business.<p>I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.

<i>Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on.</i><p>&quot;Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?&quot; Anyone have more detail on this?

The post gave me hope that a change of perspective on Google might ease up my irritation and horror from it a little—if I see it as a clumsy old behemoth, instead of the pioneer of future tech that it&#x27;s usually portrayed as, and which basically translates to ‘what cyberpunk warned about’.<p>(But then I remembered that it has literal databases of incredibly personal realtime info on billions of people, and lets police peruse locations of people that committed no crime.)

Google&#x27;s true customers are the people buying ads in the first place. They could care less about publishers.<p>Banning one publisher (unless it&#x27;s truly massive), isn&#x27;t going to have much effect to Google&#x27;s bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the &#x27;quality&#x27; of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see &#x27;invalid traffic&#x27; deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i&#x27;m sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don&#x27;t feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of &#x27;protecting&#x27; the advertiser&#x27;s side of things.

&gt; Sometimes it was &quot;dangerous and derogatory content.&quot; Sometimes it was &quot;shocking content.&quot;<p>So Google turned the filter sensitivity up to 11 just now huh? I don&#x27;t get why techdirt insists that that is not about ideology.

I wish more sites would add a Web Monetization tag so that I can support them passively with my Coil subscription. They will earn more from the time I spend on their sites than from viewing the ads.

Open markets require a fair and impartial judiciary.<p>I really wish Congress&#x27; investigations would put more emphasis on the practical, pragmatic issues. Like lack of accountability, lack of appeal, absence of recourse.<p>Establishing tort (civil justice), more or less.

Given Techdirt&#x27;s philosophy I&#x27;m surprised they don&#x27;t restrict themselves to only accepting individually curated, self-hosted ads.

While I do think TechDirt is rather scummy as a self-proclaimed rumor-monger site (one step away from clickbait), Google is an actual problem actor. This is not the first company to suffer their cruel indifference and nonsensical automated moderation. <i>grits teeth</i> I hope this story reaches more eyeballs.

Google would probably be happy if their ads ran only on sites that had only the site&#x27;s own content. It wouldn&#x27;t be surprising if Google de-monetized all sites that allow random users to submit comments.

It would seem Google has too much power.

Unaccountable monopoly