Hahaha. We have been through this with AdSense. Without the negative PR Google would have never replied. This is also a good lesson for the aspiring Play Store Android developers.
The main thriving product of the 21st century American economy is Stock of publicly traded US companies. The stock market is largely decoupled from economic reality. As long as the total market cap of all US companies is going up (which was the case in Q1), there is a "recovery". The settlement between this recovery and the real economic decline will only occur around 2040, when US dollar is debased and finally ceases to serve as the world reserve currency. Feel free to downvote.
We are a large and an absolutely legitimate publisher, that have been pestered and taunted by AdSense since 2009. Look at the history of this handle: it was created out of spite of the treatment we were given by the AdSense team.
If there was no strong bias of INNOCENT publishers against TAUNTING and making conducting our business difficult by semi-anonymous AdSense threats from no-reply email addresses, this story would be irrelevant and simply not resonate, regardless of whether it's accurate or not. Look the the Google adsense support forums where you used to redirect your clients, and at PeggyK that acted as an unofficial Google representative there, when people were banned with no explanation. Who is PeggyK- it was the largest farce I have personally witnessed, running a decent size business.
You guys created an entrenched persistent opposition by the arrogant actions of your AdSense policy team and its Ireland office specifically. For now, it's not important due to the disproportionality between Google and its clients and a near-monopoly of AdSense for eCPMS over $1, and GOOG is comfortable with this small risk.
Maybe, if you are either a $300/mo blog or you are the New York Times with a Tech section, where they could run a story on AdSense. If you are a $15,000/mo legitimate publisher - Good luck.
We left them basically: see my handle post history. As a result, our company is left harboring very negative feelings to Google overall (be it acquisition talks down the road or another kind of future interaction)
As a large publisher, we have witnessed both the $10,000 and $5,000 thresholds. It's simply true. We are now using other networks and directly working with advertisers, and our AdSense revenue is $4,500 (total ad revenue is $25,000+/mo). We also quite presciently considered making a PR stink after the first AdSense ban (we were re-instated later), but decided this could tarnish the image of our company and of our product for our clients- AdSense revenue was not important enough.
Even though after the initial ban (when we overshot $10,000/mo) we were OK'ed by a contact in their Policy Team and re-instated (a contact we found after a lot of work), EVERY time when we bounced back to $10,000 and then to $5,000 after scaling down, we would have new vague and inane threats from AdSense about our perfectly NORMAL UGC ,as if the initial conversation with their Policy has never taken place.
We basically migrated away from AdSense, but if their are ANY SERIOUS LAWYERS here interested in a class action, we have a WEALTH of DETAILED documentation. ANAL, but it's definitely interesting: we have never encountered such a SHITTY treatment by any other company, and we have about 1,500 corporate clients. Once again, we never did anything shady or different than some other publishers that are apparently Green-listed by Google.
Had an Adsense account banned in January with $15k credit taken days before payout date (After 8 months of $2k-$12k earnings history per month) and extremely low RPM&CTR. No answer to appeals, no explanation other than the vague phrase 'for policy violations'. :/
Also a large publisher, though we've surpassed the 5k/10k thresholds without issue. Out of curiosity, though, which other networks do you use and how do they compare to Adsense?
I wonder what you would say when you personally experience a $15,000/mo sudden AdSense account shutdown in a bootstrapped startup, with confiscation of $30,0000 earnings already on the account. The email will be just a template to accuse you of "fraudulent activity", and there will be no human at all that you can call. Speaking with the first hand knowledge of the matter.
I think that a lot of folks are in denial about some of Google's downright evil business practices because they admire Google's technology and like Google's attitudes towards open source software. I greatly admire this stuff too, but Google has some shocking business practices that quite frankly are unbelievable until you experience it firsthand for yourself.
When you're a small business and Google bans you for some unknown reason and seizes your money - here is what will happen.
* You might receive some type of form letter in response, but you will not be able to get an intelligent reply from a trained customer service agent.
* You will not be able to reach anybody on the phone for any price that will help you out.
* You will not find out what the issue was that caused a ban.
* Your small business will die a slow death.
* Depending on the amount of money the owners have (most small businesses don't have a lot) they will struggle to even pay their employees their final checks with this cash seized.
* You are forever banned from using AdSense again, so forget starting up another online business ever again.
Google is an amazing company that has some frankly despicable business practices that more people need to pay attention to and call them out for.
I, of course, know nothing about your case. And if I did, I wouldn't be able to discuss it in public, because it'd get me fired. It must be nice taking shots in public where you know no-one can shoot back.
But since I'm completely ignorant of your case, I'm gonna shoot my mouth off a bit, and hope I don't get in trouble for it.
Google spends insane amounts of effort tracking these cases. I've met lots of six-figure-salary folks who hours or days of every week looking into corner cases. And they're just the tip of the iceberg. Again, I'm not speaking to your particular case, but the thing we learn is that out of every hundred people who say what you're saying, at least 99 of them have repeatedly violated the rules, and more than 50 of them got multiple warnings.
And it's not like Google is keeping the money. Google's fraud-fighting effort is not a profit centre, by any stretch.
I'm not saying that Customer Service is Google's forte, but the internet is full of a lot of lies, and lots of them are told by people who tried to scam us, or scam our customers, and are hilariously outraged that we caught them.
I am posting this from Tor, since we are still dependent on Google in many ways. We had a similar situation, where a growing startup that many people here may know about (getting 15000+ signups per day at the time, now more) was getting threats from AdSense that some of our pages violated some vague and amorphous content policies that are actually written to be violated (and 99% of AdSense publishers that do not 100% control their content violate them- think of Myspace.com for example- but they were too big to violate AdSense policies). Our account bringing over $10,000/mo was shut down.
We have documented everything and we are now in a much stronger position, thanks to our users. We have access to Techcrunch/Techdirt, and we have considered publishing a comprehensive documented story of our experience with AdSense, but decided to put it on hold, since we do not want to associate our name with any controversy. When our start-up successfully exits or if it fails, the situation may change.
I just want to add a couple of things to jholman:
You start from the presumption of guilt. An old adage is that your customer is always right, but your starting point is the opposite. This is probably driven by hubris, that's embedded in Google's DNA: you KNOW BEFORE your customer that your customer wants to commit fraud, BEFORE they have actually committed it.
My point is simple: when you threaten to turn off a $5,000+/mo client, provide knowledgeable PHONE SUPPORT. Have your specialist CALL the victim business. These amounts are not a small change to many people, they will lead to bad PR, like was linked in this thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568.
And do not worry, you will not get fired for defending Google!
You could have left the first two paragraphs off and the tone of the post would have been much improved. It sounds like you've got a chip on your shoulder which impacts the positive impact your (unofficial) representation could have.
My question is: when you send emails like "it has come to our attention... fraudulent activity..." [1] [2] and confiscate $30,000+ earnings by shutting down long-standing AdSense accounts, will you do the same to the entire Gmail accounts, or just to the money transferring functionality?
One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.
Paypal is terrible, but at least you can get on the phone and talk to someone when things get hairy. Every time I have google support issues I end up waiting days or weeks for automatic replies that don't even address the issue.
To the sibling post: actually Rackspace has horrible support. They regularly experience downtime and outages and never notify customers or update their status blog. Can you get someone on the phone? Yes. Do they have anything of value to offer you? No. My favorite was when they referred me to their twitter feed, which hadn't (at the time) been posted to in 9 months.
That's not really horrible. Horrible is when AdSense shuts your account with $15k/mo revenue, confiscates $30k earnings already on the account, refuses to tell you why (a template response) and there is absolutely no human you can call and discuss this.
How does Stripe have great support? I had to wait two days for a reply. The advice I got was very good, but the response time doesn't make for "great" support.
Stripe has amazing support, even proactively reaching out when weird things happen:
Got a 500 error back from their API once and had an email from one of their engineers in my inbox almost immediately after to find out what happened and resolve it (my http lib was using stale DNS).
Paypal is actually much better. When you reach about 10k/mo, they give you a special representative from the account management team, with a special phone number, and those guys are quite smart and easily available. First hand knowledge.
As the service is connected to your email and your Google+ accounts, it's possible that Google can determine actual frauds with much more accurately than, for example, Paypal. Google is a data company after all, and I'd be surprised if they don't employ big data techniques to build trust networks and pinpoint frauds.
No one can determine fraud with absolutely no false positives. If there is no way to "appeal", then those false positives (no matter how few) will be thoroughly screwed.
I think in the future (maybe 5 years from now), writing programs for Android will become like making money with AdSense now: unless you are very large (like Facebook), or have a PR department (like NYTimes), expect letters like you now get from AdSense:
"It has come to our attention that <... blah blah ..>
As a result, we have disabled your application in Google Play store and removed it from devices where it has been installed"
And poof- all your work is gone!
Replace <...bah blah...> with "copyright", "inappropriate user generated content", "not fitting our 'business model'", "inducing users to install it", etc.
Amazon has effectively guaranteed it will stay that way for a while. Don't forget: Even early on, the Amazon Appstore was popular enough to force AT&T to stop blocking sideloading. It is only more popular today.
Let me be frank: I received a 1 page resume of a female computer scientist, where the word "women" was mentioned 8 times (organizations, etc). We did not interview that person, since frankly we were scared.
> Let me be frank: I received a 1 page resume of a female computer scientist, where the word "women" was mentioned 8 times (organizations, etc). We did not interview that person, since frankly we were scared.
I know this is usually verboten on Hacker News, but I find no other way to encode this thought...
Boy, you guys sure sound like assholes. Sounds like she dodged a bullet.
I wrote "frank" because I frankly exposed the events that actually took place (receiving the resume, word counting in it, decision). What facts are you frank about?
Would you like a resume where the word "men" appears 8 times? Or "whites"? Would you like to work with people who tout being white, Danilo Campos?
Wow. By all means – keep hanging yourself, this is fascinating.
Let's break down your profound false equivalence, here.
Men are an over-represented demographic in tech. Women are not. Women, in their under-representation, find comfort and camaraderie in the company of other women. The reasons for this are many but let's simplify to the most obvious one: women are the targets of sexism. By sharing company with other women, they can avoid hostility and discrimination based on their gender while still dealing with the subject of their passion: technology.
Further, the under-representation of women in technology is a problem. It limits the diversity of experience and opinions in this industry, which limits the scope of solutions that are discovered. It limits the pool of potential applicants for any given role.
Any individual who works to remedy these issues is a positive force.
Same goes for white people. The vast majority of powerful folks in any given western sphere of power are old white guys. They don't need any further help.
You've done a chilling job at justifying overt gender discrimination here. Those more classically trained in the academics of this villainy can do a much better job explaining it than I have, but boy – what a doozie.
And if you really thought you were in the right, you wouldn't be posting with a throwaway. If this were a truly defensible position, I'd encourage you to write up a hiring post on your company blog. "Why we don't hire women who care about advancing the cause of gender diversity in tech," you'd title it.
This has nothing to do with over-representation. In our small company, we have several female employees, including programmers. We consider all applicants purely based on their merits, minus potential problems- fear of future litigation in this case.
The fact that we are afraid to post this on the company blog, etc is simply the evidence of the diversity circus, that will speeds up selling the competitive American industry to China.
In the USSR, Cuba and North Korea you could not publicly say many things, which made its economy less competitive.
I don't care about your small company – in the broader world of technology, lack of gender diversity is a problem. And you chose not to hire someone because she cared passionately about addressing that problem.
That's fucked up, man.
> We consider all applicants purely based on their merits, minus potential problems- fear of future litigation in this case.
So you believe that if this person were terminated they would not be rational enough to know that it was about performance and not about gender.
And what would be the source of the presumption of such irrationality, I do wonder. Maybe you can fill us in!
> This will not earn you credit here: this is a hackers forum, not a government tribune.
Making sure I convey to you that your actions make you look like a dick is much more important to me than receiving "credit." And you're so obviously over-the-top wrong that anything more than ad-hominem is really just gilding the lily.
You may not care about his company, but the hiring manager should. Small companys are vulnerable so they have to be extremely careful when hiring. A bad higher can quickly become both expensive and stressful.
Remember a small company have no professorial hr department and internal legal counsel that can help reduce this kinds of risk.
I am not saying that this necessary is right, but it is easy to get forced into an decision that is less then ideal.
You're granting a premise I do not accept: that someone who cares about the cause of diversity in tech is therefore litigious. At best this is cowardice – the fear of someone willing to speak up for themselves. At worst it is misogyny – the conviction that a woman willing to speak up for herself and educated on the subject of diversity is ipso facto trouble.
Alternatively, it is a tacit admission of a sexist work environment or sexist behavior/perceptions from management.
I agree that more women need to quit "talking about being a female founder", but not interviewing someone based on the fact that they go to women's organizations/etc? That's wrong and very likely illegal.
Sorry, scared? Can you please elaborate? Were you concerned the candidate would be spending too much time at conferences? Or too much time... being a woman? I'm honestly not clear.
Scared of her being litigious (e.g. if she has performance problems and gets fired (like any other employee in our company), she would accuse us of discrimination)- stuff like that.
People who attend conferences about women aren't a protected class. So it wouldn't be illegal unless you could demonstrate that filtering out people who attend conferences about women systematically discriminated against women. This would be fairly difficult at best, and almost impossible unless it were a large organization with an obvious gender imbalance.
Let me be frank: I received a 1 page resume of a female computer scientist, where the word "women" was mentioned 8 times (organizations, etc). We did not interview that person, since frankly we were scared.
You should delete your comment immediately. You have violated long-standing and well-enforced laws against gender-based discrimination on hiring. You openly admit that you did not hire a qualified female candidate primarily because of her gender. Your comment could, and if it comes to it, would be used in litigation.
You have completely missed the point of the comment that you are responding to. It's not that she's a woman, but that she put so much of her efforts into that identity.
Or maybe you're joking, but jokes don't go well in discussions like this.
Women scare a lot of men. That is no doubt the real subtext of imagery of armed to the teeth, chain mail bikini clad women in certain types of fiction.
But I have found it is socially unacceptable to remark on that fact.
I believe they're referring to a fear of legal problems because the individual was obviously very passionate about the issue of women in tech. Not commenting on the legality of such a concern, just pointing out what they were likely concerned about.
