Banned From Making Money, These YouTubers Share Their Stories

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.<p>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 <i>real</i> 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.<p>In fact, ideally you need to <i>already</i> 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.

I was banned from AdSense for a similar reason.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

If you think about it from Google's perspective, its working like its supposed to.<p>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?

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.

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.

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.<p>How would one find the others? Well... <a href="http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117" rel="nofollow">http://memegenerator.net/instance/31212117</a> might work for creating one's own community.<p>Sometimes, the best way to show a structure's flaws is to bring down the structure by abusing those flaws.

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.<p>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.

i suffered this several years ago. even had a good friend explore, in person, the team who banned me. no movement, no appeal.<p>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.<p>in this scenario, fuck google.

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.<p>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.<p>It makes absolutely no sense to me.