Are you concerned? Adsense banning of high earning accounts those past few years

Marketing
1

And now there is an open letter from some anonymous ex-employee.
I don’t know if it’s true, it looks like it is because it’s very precise, but if I were to do a fake open letter, I too would be very precise in my fake letter… Because it then looks real.

But I’m biased to believe this open letter to be real, because what happened to me can’t be explained just by saying “oh well, Google hires monkeys, so they do a monkey job” it just doesn’t fit the image I have of a big organization… OK you hire cheap labor / monkeys, but you don’t let them handle everything, you also have upper management to deal with parts of the process down the line…
For instance I’m not surprised if a monkey bans my account by mistake, but then I would expect the appeal process to be handled by humans, with some education, able to do a proper copy&paste for instance… And it obviously wasn’t the case for my several appeal processes…

So, the explanation that this open letter brings suits better to a big corporation such as Google which we know all tends to have sociopath behavior… If they need quick cash in order to improve their share’s value for this quarter, they’ll do anything to achieve their goal, including banning high earning publishers who are unlikely to make further problem about the ban and keep the money to improve the quarterly figures, even scarifying the account’s future potential earnings, as long as the immediate needs of the corporation are met.

What do you think? Have you been banned in the past years with a high earning account? High earning from the open letter seems to be a minimum of $5,000 a month…
When they banned me, they kept $11,000 earnings from the month of June and 3 weeks into July. So, the date of my ban, the amount of my earnings, the very surprising ban itself (no clear reason) and the bad-joke appeal process(es) all point to the things mentioned in the open letter…

Please share your opinion about this…

2

I get these kinds of “this is real” things in my emails from an aunt all the time.
She gets them and then fowards the “news” to all her connections without checking on their validity.

Anyway, I’m more skeptical than she and have learned to check things out before I think of forwarding them.

In this case, a Search reveals that it is indeed fake

3

OK, but is it a reason to report my post to moderators, really?!? :slight_smile:

All I see from your link is that Google denied the whole thing to be true. That’s it. So now we have to believe Google’s version?
I say, both possibilities are still open. True or False.
It’s not because “Google” (well someone at Google) denies it that it automagically becomes impossibly true…

Anyway, associating this thing with a chain letter from your aunt is once again not very cool… It’s a bit more than that, more precise.

And as I wrote, I’m concerned by that because it matches so exactly my own experience, that’s it.

But ok, if you believe it is totally fake, then good for you. I wish I could have definitive opinions like this just because the accused denied any wrongdoing. I wish but I can’t. :slight_smile:

4

Why would Google ban the accounts that are making them the most money? Any site earning a lot of money by displaying AdSense ads is earning Google more than a lot of money.

5

[font=calibri]Precisely. If Google realised it was not making enough money on AdSense, it would do far better to just reduce the payouts. The payout rate is completely opaque, and as a publisher you have no idea what you should be being paid per click … because there is no “should”. Within the last 30 days, my CPC rate has varied between £0.14 and £0.43, sometimes doubling or halving from one day to the next. The average this month was £0.29, which is marginally below the average over the last 2 years … but so what? If Google decided I wasn’t profitable enough, they could quite easily drop that down to £0.25, £0.20 or even less, and I would have no recourse to complaint.

As Felgall says, arbitrarily culling accounts because they have a month’s worth of profit in them makes no business sense at all – they would be killing the geese that laid the golden eggs – and puts them at huge reputational and legal risk. Google is not a short-termist company, and they wouldn’t kill off an account that could net them huge profits in the future for the sake of a couple of thousand dollars in unpaid revenue. They just wouldn’t do it.[/font]

6

Well if it’s only this basic logic which renders for you the whole thing improbable, you may not have read the open letter indeed.
Corporations with share holders don’t have the same reasoning as we do as individuals.
Don’t you know that corporations are firing thousands of employees while earning billions in profit, why is that?
It has to do with share market. If one quarter you have bad results, then the share goes down and this is more important to a corporation than we can imagine as individuals thinking at our level, we don’t have shares values on ourselves, we don’t understand how we would act if we did have shares value on ourselves.

By not paying high earning accounts and closing them in mass, and of course not sending the money to the advertizers, you can drastically change a quarter figures…
Instead of paying those publishers their due, (often the ban happens 3 weeks into the month, so it’s 7 weeks of earning, not just on month) you add all the money to your profit balance. The leak is about high earning accounts, we’re not talking about the mass of banned small-time accounts for various reasons.
It will make a big difference of course on the current quarter’s figures if you do that on a big scale and with high earning accounts.

You say google earns money with those publishers so they wouldn’t close the accounts, you’re so wrong… Google is earning money, no matter what. It’s not about risking bankruptcy, it’s about avoiding the share value to go too low, by having positive results in a given quarter.
Of course I forgot to mention, but people should have this in mind, it was at a time where google share DID go down, they were talking about reducing their workforce, and I guess they did, etc…

While earning profit, this is not the question…

Plus, there is absolutely NO SHORTAGE of high earning adsense accounts. Even those banned may eventually try to get in again.
Adsense doesn’t have a problem in having new high performing webmasters.

So you see, the thing that seems illogical to us may make good sense to a corporation with share holders at a specific point in time with specific goals (like reassuring the market by improving THIS quarter figures, not the next quarter)!

I’m not saying it prooves anything of course, I’m just saying that the argument for dismissing the anonymous claim because of individual considerations is not valid for a multinational company such as google (or apple for instance).

7

AdSense ban sites because they break the rules - not because they make lots of money (for Google). If you obey the rules then you don’t get banned regardless of how much the ads on your site make.

Anyone complaining about getting banned is just upset because they got caught breaking the rules.

8

If you say so, you must be right.
I’m sorry.

9

This.

On top of all of that if they were banning high traffic sites first, then it would be already known in the WebDev world that they are untrustworthy and unpredictable. Regardless of Red, Yellow, Blue, or Green status, the word would eventually get around simply because high traffic sites generally have more developers. More developers, more people talking. More people talking, the more word spreads.

I hope this “leak” sparks some enthusiastic journalists to do some research, but until then it’s just a random story on pastebin.

From the big Reddit thread yesterday:

[–]HotLunch 27 points 1 day ago
>I have carefully planned this leak to coincide with certain factors
Any person that would “carefully plan” out a leak would include in that plan a way to legitimize the leak itself.

Here’s some links for you:

The original thread
The original poster

The largest thread

Hacker News discussion

10

Now, one day later, there’s a follow-up, a new letter in response to the various reactions :
http://pastebin.com/DXTu8Mcm
What is funny is that perhaps it’s another prankster who wrote the second letter, who knows? :slight_smile:

11

That’s more unbelievable than the first one. It doesn’t even read like it was written by the same person.

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Yes, at least it gives us some humorous things.
Me I find this very funny. I guess some serious people at Google must not find this funny for their nice public image, but it’s funny anyway for me :slight_smile:
And yes, it could be another person, who posted on pastebin that response, it’s even funnier I think and I’m waiting for a third one, why not :slight_smile:
Yes, I know, I have nothing better to do… :frowning:

13

i used it and get banned about 2 times :frowning: i always did’nt get what google wants from meee !!