Multiple Banned AdSense Users Suing Google Alleging Fraud

[mrengine]

Small businesses and tech startups are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in search ad revenue from Google because they have difficulty following the company's policies.

One company, Pubshare, has sued Google for nearly $1 million in revenue it allegedly earned from ads, which Google declined to pass on to the company.

In total, Business Insider has heard from seven companies that say they lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were suddenly banned from AdSense.

Read more: [businessinsider.com...]

[cbpayne]

I predict that they will all be epic fails.
I have seen many of those types of viral video/image sites and often it is difficult to tell which is the adsense advert and which is the button to click to go to the next image/video
Of course that violates adsense policies! Adwords advertisers would be suing Google if they did not remove those sites!

[RedBar]

Why does it always seem to take "months" before Google denys payment.

Surely a new site earning thousands of Dollars a day should be monitored?

[engine]

There's a Google blog post linked in that article which just needs clarification.
Here's the blog post link [adsense.blogspot.com...]

It's worth pointing out that it is dated 2012, which isn't clear in the original article.

[mrengine]

Why does it always seem to take "months" before Google denys payment.

An attorney addressed this by stating:

"Allowing an AdSense publisher to accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings without any warnings of improper practices, and then abruptly refusing to pay out any of those earnings by means of auto-generated form e-mails is the very definition of bad faith,"

And that:

"he ran his ads in the same format as those on Chacha.com, Dictionary.com, and Answers.com, which continue to run AdSense advertising."

And also that:

"All the companies say they were following Google's strict rules about how to place ads on their site. Some of them say they were encouraged or given approval for their ad plans by Google's sales staff."

It's a rather interesting story since in some cases Google employees said everything was fine with the layouts. The problem is that Google sales reps are not compliance reps. This raises the question: Has an Adsense publisher in good faith attempted to abide by/seek approval for their use of Adsense on their website?

Though Google tried to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge let it move forward. Obviously there is enough preliminary evidence to support the plaintiff's claims. Others may separately sue or the cases could possibly get merged into the existing lawsuit alleging the same withholding of payments.

[bwnbwn]

In the article it says "That traffic generated about $1 million between September 2013 and October 2013, the suit alleges, before Google sent him this notice saying it would not pay any of the money his ads had earned:"

You mean to tell me he went a year between payments. Something isn't right here maybe a month not a year.

[Leosghost]

In the article it says "That traffic generated about $1 million between September 2013 and October 2013, the suit alleges, before Google sent him this notice saying it would not pay any of the money his ads had earned:"

You mean to tell me he went a year between payments. Something isn't right here maybe a month not a year.

between September 2013 and October 2013

That is only one month..where are you getting a year from ?

[EditorialGuy]

Of course, Google could always write an algorithm to ban publishers immediately (and automatically) for the slightest perceived infractions. Would that be a popular solution? Probably not.

[cbpayne]

There is no way that Google is going to ban publishers earning that amount of money without a damn good and strong reason!

Google wants publishers in the ecosystem. They make their % from those publishers, so why would they want to ban them for no reason.

The only reason would be that the sites were returning poor value to the advertiser, so they removed them from the ecosystem and returned the outstanding earnings to the advertiser.

If Google did not ban these publishers, the Adwords advertisers will be getting a poorer return on their $'s and then leave, taking their business elsewhere.

The sense of "entitlement" that banned publishers seem to have never ceases to amaze me.

[ogletree]

Google never banned my account they just banned me in Google. Of course that was 2004.

If Google can prove they gave all that money back to advertisers I think they are ok. If Google kept the money and did not split it with them I think Google has a problem.

It would be nice if Google was forced to pay everybody money that was given and taken away.

[cbpayne]

I have had money refunded to my adwords account.

It would be nice if Google was forced to pay everybody money that was given and taken away.

So those who set up 'click rings' to deliberately defraud advertisers should still get paid?

[ogletree]

Google defrauded advertisers not the websites. Google is taking the easy way out by approving everybody. I also believe that Google knows darn well what websites they are putting their ads on and they wait a month or two before they ban them so they can take all the money and not have to share it with their partner in crime.

You know Google does not give you your money back. They give you a Adwords credit. So if you accidently spent $10,000 you have to pay your credit card bill which might mean interest if you don't have that kind of money to pay off. If your normal budget is $1000 a month Google gets a free $10,000 loan. The only time I have seen them give that kind of money back (as a credit) is if your account was hacked. I have never seen them give a refund if your website showed up on some worthless website because most of them are. The lawyer has a point he was not doing anything that lots of other people are doing. The adsense network is a huge fraud by Google.

[RedBar]

That traffic generated about $1 million between September 2013 and October 2013

And absolutely no one at Google thought of checking out a site suddenly earning $33+K a day to ascertain whether or not it may be valid?

Don't they have alarm bells there?

[bwnbwn]

Leosghost heck if I know bad read on my part my brain said a year and I read a month my bad

[martinibuster]

...no one at Google thought of checking out a site suddenly earning $33+K...

Good point. That's common sense.

[superclown2]

I have had money refunded to my adwords account.

I was booted out of adsense some years ago because my conversion rate was too high. Google still paid me every penny of earned commissions up to the termination date though.

Best thing that happened. Within a couple of months I was dealing direct with the advertisers and I will never, never deal with such a fickle and arrogant company as Google again. I can't criticise their honesty though.

[EditorialGuy]

And absolutely no one at Google thought of checking out a site suddenly earning $33+K a day to ascertain whether or not it may be valid?

They did. That's why the site was banned.

[Leosghost]

It took them 30 days @33$K per day earnings to notice or to act though..not very "rapid"..

Meanwhile advertisers were getting billed, and even if they eventually got a "credit note" against further adwords spend, 30 days with apparently high CPC ads running for no ROI to the advertiser could have ( may in fact have ) bankrupted some advertisers..an adwords credit not isn't much use to the advertiser in that case..

And they would like me to give them access to my credit card ( they keep contacting me to "try adwords" ) with that kind of slow motion reactivity ?..

No thanks Eric, Larry and Sergey..

I think I'll pass..

[Selen]

It might be better for security when Adsense publishers get paid every quarter as opposed to every month (or they could have an option to get paid every 6 / 12 months plus some bonus) because that would give everybody more time to double check if everything is in good standing and that an expected ROI is met.

If expected advertiser's ROI is not met the advertiser could be automatically refunded X% from publishers earnings. That way advertisers would feel they get a good deal and the process would be more transparent.

[BillyS]

Google runs the best online ad platform from both a publisher and marketing perspective. I'm thinking Google has a lot of solid processes when it comes to banning a publisher.

[IanKelley]

Traffic quality issues are even harder to catch algorithmically in real time than click fraud. There is a lot you can do, but there's much more you can't. Instead you have to wait a bit for data to accumulate and then look at trends and action rates.

Even if it were physically possible to have humans monitor even a small percentage of a large publisher network, they still wouldn't be able to make determinations right away in all cases.

Side note: Once upon a time PPC companies did pay for some or all of earnings up to the point an account was banned. At that time advertisers didn't understand how much bad traffic they were paying for and the PPC providers themselves (Yahoo/Overture especially) hadn't understood the extent of it yet. This made click fraud generators very very happy, it would have killed the industry had it continued.

There are only two reasonable options: either advertisers get refunded and disabled publishers don't get paid, or the advertisers pay for useless traffic. The quantity of bad traffic it's possible get under the radar is far too high for Adsense or Bing Ads to just take the loss when they discover it.

[micklearn]

Traffic quality issues are even harder to catch algorithmically in real time than click fraud.

Good point, according to this recent article from Wired, 56% of web traffic isn't human.

[wired.com...]