Google is not paying my Admob money even after 5 months has passed (no violation, self-close of account)
Through the Kafkaesque maze of non-existent Adsense support, my case (they say) finally got escalated to a payment person at Google. Yet, I didn't hear update for the past month.
You can't ask anything about your case and you can't get any time projection on when you'll hear anything back.
If you don't have big traffic or huge social reach, you are expendable and can get stuck in a never-ending hell.
In the old days, bigcorps just wouldn't engage with ISVs directly at all. Instead, as an ISV, you'd engage the services of an 'integrator' or 'reseller' — a smaller-scale but still-large entity that you'd have a support contract with — where the integrator would then have a support contract with the bigcorp. If you were having an issue with the bigcorp's product, you'd complain to the reseller, and then they'd complain to the bigcorp. And because the bigcorp only had a few such resellers as clients, each reseller would actually be able to get the bigcorp on the line.
This was (and still is) the IBM model for B2B software; and it was also the industry-standard model for game developers (interacting with the platform owner through a "publisher" — essentially taking the role here of an integrator.) It's probably still the industry-standard model for musicians to engage with big record labels.
I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for this model. Their focus on "scaling services as much as possible using as few human support staff as possible" means this model is essentially perfect for them. But they ignore it. Maybe because they think it'd make them look like a dinosaur?
(I know they do do it in some places — we use GCP, and apparently, to be able to switch from card-based billing to invoice-based billing, we're required to also switch from direct GCP support, to a support-contract with a GCP reseller. So we'd be paying the reseller — the invoices would be riding as accounts-receivable on the reseller's books, rather than on Google's!)
> I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for ['integrator' or 'reseller' — a smaller-scale but still-large entity that you'd have a support contract with] model.
YouTube MCNs are more like book publishers: none of them are very large in number of supply-side entities aggregated. Some of them have "popular" talent that could very well get YouTube's attention on their own, but none of them are doing collective bargaining for thousands of creators. So there are still tons of them; so YouTube doesn't really relate to them on a first-name basis.
Like book publishers, MCNs mostly offer one of two benefits: either "we do the hard business parts of running a content-creation business for you" (not a lie, though it's a bad deal); or "we have at least one very popular creator, and so by joining with us, you're at-least-theoretically taking advantage of the attention they get." (When that's tenuous, as the popular creators aren't beholden to these groups and might leave at any time, and if they do, there goes your trump card in dealing with YouTube.)
Adsense held my funds for 6+ years in a never ending loop of bank account not valid->can’t edit this bank account. Same kafkaesque maze of non-existent support. Beyond frustrating.
One day it just suddenly let me fix the issue. No idea why.
Your point is spot on, if you don’t have a huge social media following you might as well be invisible. This has to change, hopefully via law. Because it isn’t just a google problem.
I'm banned for life from using adsense because my brother thought it would be a fun prank to repeatedly click the ads on my blog. I reported it myself before the next payout and received a generic "you have violated our policies" and a ban that's still there to this day some 15 years later.
Yeah. I should probably note that I wasn’t continually working on the issue. It was attempted sporadically over that time period - mainly because google’s support maze ..err I mean ‘system’ is so terrible.
I would spend ~20 minutes following different resolution paths, get mad at them not helping at all, forget about it because this level of frustration is not worth $100 to me, repeat a few times a year. Don’t get me wrong, $100 is $100 - I just wasn’t in dire need of it I guess.
I have the opposite problem. I changed my payment info without telling Adsense so they send menacing paper letters that threaten the process of escheatment if I don't claim my funds. I decided I don't want their services in my life, and when it came to accepting their money I was fine with leaving that behind as well. Apparently when enough monthly checks stack up it causes problems. I've moved since then, so I hope the new tennant was wise enough to just send them some new payment info.
I'm not a lawyer and this isn't advice... but it seems to me that kind of non-payment is probably the kind of thing you can resolve pretty quickly with appropriate legal action. A simple letter to legal saying, "your terms say you'll pay me X, it hasn't been paid. I'd like you to do so or I'll have to look at taking all appropriate steps to get paid." Will often get the right person to look at the issue. And if that fails actually filing the appropriate action almost always does.
I think the only letter the legal team expects through google-legal-support@google.com is a notice of sueing them. I really don't have the power to sue them in a US court.
Do people have success when they notify (not sue) the legal team about Google acting against their Terms of Service?
If you are a citizen of another country doing business with Google it should follow that your country's courts have jurisdiction, if you're in the EU I imagine any EU country has jurisdiction (not because I imagine you are, but just as an example of how you might be able to pick a better jurisdiction - but that of course would be up to talking with a lawyer about)
If the amount is low enough you can sue them in small claims court in the US, which the amount is dependent on the state. Small claims court is geared more towards people self defending.
This may not apply to where you are, but you really don't need a lawyer for small claims courts in the US, since the monetary values are relatively small.
That said, I'd be surprised if your court system required you to lawyer up for every (relatively) small contract infringement- contracts essentially become pointless for anything less than 20 hours of billable time from a lawyer.
Google is not paying my Admob money even after 5 months has passed (no violation, self-close of account)
Through the Kafkaesque maze of non-existent Adsense support, my case (they say) finally got escalated to a payment person at Google. Yet, I didn't hear update for the past month.
You can't ask anything about your case and you can't get any time projection on when you'll hear anything back.
If you don't have big traffic or huge social reach, you are expendable and can get stuck in a never-ending hell.