His practice is a clear case of click fraud and his above-normal click-through rates demonstrate that he was successful in that fraudulent behavior.
Google correctly identified his business as dishonest and terminated his account per agreement that the guy signed when he started using AdSense.
You try to make a case for Google trying to determine shades of gray, but it's a non-scalable, slippery slope.
The current rule is crystal clear and simple: don't encourage users to click on ads they otherwise wouldn't. By definition every such click is fraudulent because the user wouldn't otherwise perform it.
Google (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot implement more subtle rules (that weight factors like how many times someone did it, how often does he do it, how subtle the encouragement is, how many kids he has to support) in a scalable way.
Google couldn't even apply more subtle rules in a consistent way, giving fraudsters even more weapon in what is a PR game (take all the ample, emotional justification from the above post AND allow that fraudster to point to other people who are doing similar things but Google hasn't taken action against them because some fallible person applied a different subtle standard for what fraud is than some other fallible person).
As this thread demonstrates, there's plenty of people willing to sympathise with the fraudster despite clear, self-admitted evidence of wrongdoing based purely on his self-professed (hence extremely biased) version of how good of a person he is and how good intentions were and how badly he was treated by big, cold Google. Emotion can trump facts.
"Emotion can trump facts". I think the guy's point is, emotion should sometimes trump facts. No Google human was involved. A big chunk of the internet economy is controlled by a heartless robot who can't tell the difference between a middle ages sailor guy going a little over the line, and dedicated click fraud. Shit, even the IRS lets you explain to a human and maybe get a second chance.
Given how long this went on, I'd be willing to bet that an advertiser noticed the abnormally high referrals + abnormally high bounce rate, and complained to Google. The whole "Google's impersonal algorithm did this to me" stance is entirely a guess, because they explicitly don't disclose what was detected nor how it was detected.
Heck, I'd bet an algorithm would've caught it (or at least flagged it, caused a review, and had it confirmed) a loooong time ago. Which would've cut off his income while it was smaller. A smooth-functioning, impersonal algorithm may have been preferable in this case.
Why? How far from "willful intent" is "willful ignorance"? Especially in the face of precisely, unquestionably violating the very first agreement checkbox of a contract?[1] If you can even claim ignorance, that is; they were informed. That's kind of the point of contracts.
It's a peculiarity of AdSense that turns what would normally be helpful behavior (please check out my advertisers -- they have really good stuff I personally recommend) into "fraudulent" behavior. The reason is, of course, that the site author has zero input or control over the contents of the AdSense boxes, and as such can't really recommend what's in there. You can _hope_ that what's in the box is a relevant ad for your readers, but you really don't have any way of knowing.
Google could provide a kind of back-and-forth here, to restore the ability of a site author to provide a testimonial for a particular advertiser. An author would have to provide a (short and limited) list of sites and testimonial copy for each one.
A sailing site could then, for a particular sailcloth manufacturer's ad, provide a short testimonial noting the high quality of the product, etc...and Google could serve up that custom testimonial along with the ad.
The missing part of his article is the exact text of his message to his subscribers re: 'I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers.'
There's a difference between "I support this product and you should check them out" and "click on these ads." Google's ads are targeted and beyond them being about sailing, he doesn't necessarily know what's being shown.
So it's pretty difficult for him to personally recommend particular ads or companies. I'd like to see the exact messaging he sent to his subscribers.
Google correctly identified his business as dishonest and terminated his account per agreement that the guy signed when he started using AdSense.
You try to make a case for Google trying to determine shades of gray, but it's a non-scalable, slippery slope.
The current rule is crystal clear and simple: don't encourage users to click on ads they otherwise wouldn't. By definition every such click is fraudulent because the user wouldn't otherwise perform it.
Google (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot implement more subtle rules (that weight factors like how many times someone did it, how often does he do it, how subtle the encouragement is, how many kids he has to support) in a scalable way.
Google couldn't even apply more subtle rules in a consistent way, giving fraudsters even more weapon in what is a PR game (take all the ample, emotional justification from the above post AND allow that fraudster to point to other people who are doing similar things but Google hasn't taken action against them because some fallible person applied a different subtle standard for what fraud is than some other fallible person).
As this thread demonstrates, there's plenty of people willing to sympathise with the fraudster despite clear, self-admitted evidence of wrongdoing based purely on his self-professed (hence extremely biased) version of how good of a person he is and how good intentions were and how badly he was treated by big, cold Google. Emotion can trump facts.