

Can anyone explain the business case for Adsense's no-contact banning policies? - thenomad

So, there's a lot of noise around Adsense account bans or suspensions right now, not least from me, and it's got me wondering.<p>Google are smart people. There must be a reason they're doing what they're doing.<p>But what they're doing is dropping 4, 5 and 6-figure sources of income, in their hundreds if not thousands, rather than send a single email.<p>As I said elsewhere, I speak from experience here. Adsense was disabled on my own site - which does about 600k page impressions a month - in late August, for some very vague reasons. I received a single email which copy-pasted a large section of the Adsense ToS, and that was it - ads disabled. No indication of what ad was breaking the rules, or even what rules I was breaking. No personal contact.<p>How on earth can a business justify dropping $10k+ a year in revenue without even making an hour's attempt to fix the problem? I know Google staff are highly paid, but I'm assuming most of them aren't on more than $10k ph!<p>Given this is far from a limited phenomenon, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Google have lost 7 figures - maybe even 8 figures - of revenue over the last few years by not being willing to have anyone get in touch with website owners.<p>I'm genuinely interested. What on earth would justify this as a business practice? How do you possibly make the case that it's not worth thousands of dollars to have someone send an email?<p>There must be some thinking here - I just can't figure out what it is.
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hcho
Publishers are Google's product. The bans are a product quality assurance
exercise for them.

They do not really lose any business when they cut out a publisher. They
almost always have plenty of other options to display their inventory on.

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thenomad
So basically, whether they treat advertisers or publishers well is a function
of whether they have too many advertisers or too many publishers?

Makes sense - although it does seem a bit like eating your seed corn. As and
when the economy recovers and there's an online advertising boom, the balance
may shift.

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kijin
If too many people generate fake clicks, advertisers will no longer want to
place expensive ads with Google. That loss could easily amount to 10 (or even
11) figures. Over 90% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Even a
slight reduction in that revenue could cost billions.

If AdSense is associated with websites that contain copyright-infringing
material, Google could find itself on the losing side of a gigantic lawsuit
with the MAFIAA. That loss, too, could easily amount to billions.

If AdSense is associated with any other kind of content with questionable
legality (child porn, hate speech, bomb-making tutorials, etc), there could be
similar financial ramifications, or worse, damage to Google's brand. This can
also be worth billions.

So it might make sense, from a purely financial point of view, to be overly
aggressive in banning AdSense users. A few false positives might cost tens of
millions of dollars, but that could be the lesser of two evils if the
alternative is to let a few false negatives slip by.

 _Edit:_ As for lack of communication, someone at Google seems to think that
letting people know too many details about exactly which page violates which
policy would allow the bad guys to work around those policies, leading to more
false negatives. Security through obscurity! Similarly, if you ever set up a
mail server, you'll quickly realize that Google doesn't let you know exactly
what you need to do to get rid of that pesky "via your.hostname.com" message.
You could try adding DKIM and cross your fingers, but there's no guarantee.
That's an anti-spam & anti-phishing feature, and Google doesn't want spammers
and phishers to know its exact policies and algorithms.

According to Wikipedia [1], AdSense represents 28% of Google's ad revenue. But
unlike ads placed in Google's own pages, Google needs to pay out the majority
(~68%) of that revenue to website owners, so AdSense's actual contribution to
profit is much lower than that. Google has plenty of other places where they
can place ads far more profitably, even if a lot of third-party websites
dropped AdSense.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsense>

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thenomad
Thanks - that's a great reply, and makes a depressing amount of sense.

In the case of page layout issues rather than click fraud, though, I still
can't see why it doesn't make more sense to work with the publisher to achieve
a layout everyone's happy with. I'm not sure what the bad guys could get out
of knowing that Google doesn't like inline ads without a border, for example.

