Horses driving carts

Obviously commercial organisations are aiming to monetize their internet presence. However, it seems to be increasingly the case that they are more concerned with ad revenue than the experience of their users. Some of the stupidities ...

• Mattel have a Scrabble game that connects to Facebook, and have aggressively chased off other companies that have produced games that are too similar. It is one of the most irritating Facebook apps. They have attached an advertising engine to it. For a long time, every time you played three moves, it would produce a black screen inviting you to buy their ad removal packages to avoid a seven second wait - in other words, it was advertising its own ad removal package.
  
  This pales into insignificance compared to the apps behaviour on a tablet. Here, particularly when playing against the computer, the same 30 second advert is generated pretty much between every turn, you can't exit from it, and when the advert ends, it shuts down the app.
  
• AVG anti-virus have a well-established free antivirus, which aside from the fact that it kills performance of computers, does provide what seems like a pretty good level of protection. In Windows 10 it produces pop-ups, and today, it has started producing the same pop-up advert every few minutes.
  
• The "click-bait" slideshows that you get to from social media, which sometimes suggest they have interesting content, now typically spread the text for one slide over three clicks - presumably to serve more ad views.
  
• I remember reading a grumbly Guardian article a while ago about ads on the internet - whilst downloading animated adverts on the same page was grinding my browser to a halt.
  
• One of the main suppliers of automated ads has this obsession with things that you have looked at or searched for. So you look for, say, Converse shoes on Amazon. Ta-dah! Every web page you look at for the next week has an advert for them. Now, think for a minute, Mr Ad Builder. The likelihood is that either 1) I bought the shoes or 2) I decided I didn't need to. That was a search I did two days ago - am I likely to want to do it again today?

These strategies are self-defeating. The reason Adblock gained traction was because of the increasing intrusiveness of internet advertising. If people find advertising intrusive and can't get round it, they will either block it or use different products - advertising on the internet drives people away more effectively than it promotes things.

Thanks, partner

So this happened yesterday:

With our advertising programs, we strive to create an online ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers and users. For this reason, we sometimes have to take action against accounts that demonstrate behavior toward users or advertisers that may negatively impact how the ecosystem is perceived. In your case, we have detected invalid activity in your AdSense account and it has been disabled.

I've had an AdSense account for quite a few years. It's never made a significant amount of money - in fact, never even enough for them to have to pay me at all, despite the fact that I had to give all sorts of financial guarantees and comply with US tax legislation.

More recently, my son linked the AdSense account to his YouTube video channel. In actual fact, he had set up his own AdSense account, jumping through all the required hoops. Just at the point that he had a video that had had enough views to earn some money, he was told that the account was invalid, as there was another one registered at the same address. Why they hadn't seen fit to point this out when the account was registered is not clear. So he cancelled that account, and linked it to mine.

Joel's videos were more successful at gathering revenue than mine were. A couple in the last month suddenly got a much higher amount of revenue than any previously had, with no warning. Having worked patiently at the account for years, that cheered us up. But it was too good to be true. Out of the blue, this email arrived, and the AdSense/YouTube partnership was suspended.

As far as I can tell, the likelihood is that bots - automatic programmes which crawl over the internet - had "clicked" on adverts, artificially inflating the rate of return. The account was suspended because of the suspicion that we had clicked on the advert links ourselves, or paid someone to do it. That's crazy given our context - I wasn't really interested but had adverts there because I might as well; Joel's long term ambition was to make a living as a YouTuber, so he had scrupulously stuck by the rules (and frequently had to explain them to me) - and beyond that, operated defensively. He lived in fear of getting a "copyright strike" - someone filing a complaint against one of his videos which would lead to YouTube "shooting first" and not bothering to ask questions at all.

The only "encouraging" thing is that other, much bigger, AdSense "partners" have had exactly the same experience - in some cases, losing revenue streams of thousands of dollars on a whim. An appeal process exists - you're invited to explain yourself in 3000 characters, but you aren't told the grounds for your suspension, and if the appeal fails, not only do you have no further recourse, but you are banned from working with AdSense in the future.

So here was my appeal:

How do users get to your site? How do you promote your site? *

I assume that the site in question is the YouTube channel (jomightymaniac) rather than the blog (exilefromgroggs.blogspot.com) which has only ever earned pennies. It is promoted through YouTube subscriptions, posting of links on blogs (joelsthought.blogspot.com, jomightymaniac.blogspot.com), and links on social media sites.

I don't know who reads this. Please don't simply bin this account because you think it makes no real difference, and nobody can come back to you about it.

For years my son has wanted to make a living as a YouTuber, and has scrupulously tried to abide by the rules, and accepted that the impersonal YouTube/AdSense machine is actually indifferent to the people that provide the original material they display. Through their untimely actions, they have already cost him money on multiple occasions that, as far as he was concerned, he had earned. There is NOBODY that will talk to him about these either, but even so he has put up with it in pursuit of his dream.

Have you or your site ever violated the AdSense program policies or Terms & Conditions? If so, how? Also, include any relevant information that you believe may have resulted in invalid activity. *

Not consciously. I couldn't say that we have faithfully skipped every ad that started showing, or never clicked on an advert, but there has been no systematic attempt to artificially create ad traffic either. Neither have we watched videos multiple times to drive up traffic.

Google describes its AdSense users as "partners". In fact, it is completely indifferent to them, even though they are providing the original content that makes the internet a suitable medium for advertising. It won't lift a finger to help them and will drop them with any excuse, and apparently without meaningful appeal. This is not "partnership". Why do you have this policy of shooting first and asking questions later? Your "partners" are depending upon you.

Please include any data from your site traffic logs or reports that indicate suspicious IP addresses, referrers, or requests which could explain invalid activity. *

We have no such analysis of either website; we are amateur users, and not that sophisticated. We did notice that two recent videos attracted a surprising amount of revenue, especially given the relatively small number of views they received. In them, my son had been trying a new editing technique, but this should not have generated more revenue. We were surprised by this bulge in revenue, but since it hardly represented a fortune ($25, maybe?) we didn't consider it ridiculous.

I note from an internet search that Google has a record of hitting publishers when the actual issue seems to have been either bots clicking or possibly even malicious users (my son has lived in fear of being hit by a malicious or even incorrect "copyright strike"). Our accounts are not significant either to Google or to their advertisers; in the years that our relationship with AdSense has existed, we have not earned enough to be paid even once.

We await your response with hope, but not optimism.

And here was the response:

Thanks for the additional information provided in your appeal, we appreciate your continued interest in the AdSense program. After thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we're unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

So that's that. A "partnership" arrangement that has existed for probably ten years, which has cost Google nothing, deleted without warning, or explanation, or appeal.