

Banned From Making Money, These YouTubers Share Their Stories - Capricornucopia
http://kotaku.com/5964998/banned-from-making-money-these-youtubers-share-their-stories

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mistercow
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.

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lambda
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.

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pavel_lishin
Isn't this basically an argument against ever creating any iPhone app?

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lambda
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
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.

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shocks
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.

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ajross
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.

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shocks
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.

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noonespecial
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?

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pkteison
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.

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noonespecial
It might be more of a supply and demand thing. Google thinks it has an endless
supply of small bit-players willing to supply content so it doesn't value any
of them. They might be right.

It really hasn't cost them anything so they haven't spent anything trying to
fix it.

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stephengillie
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
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.

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marksaccucci
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
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.

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hinoglu
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> 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.

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chimi
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.

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falcolas
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.

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chimi
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
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.

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chimi
Right, dozens out of dozens of millions.

It's totally irrational, sensationalist, click bait.

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jnazario
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.

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at-fates-hands
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
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.

