Peggy K in the comments!!! We remember her from the days when our AdSense account with over $40,000 on it got banned for obscure Hungarian or Thai keyword in a user profile that caused the ban (majority of our users are English speaking). When we tried to contact Google, we had to post on a product forum, where Peggy K would relay our "concerns" to the "adsense policy team". It was never clear whether this Peggy K was an employee of Google, a volunteer or a collective support handle, but many smaller publishers with tens of thousands of dollars suddenly confiscated by the big G and their revenue suddenly cut off by a [email protected] email had no choice but to appeal to her on a public product forum!
It has been posted numerous times here: you can only rely on AdSense for earnings if you are either a large company with both PR and legal departments (e.g. MySpace or NYTimes) or a $300/mo blog where the sudden loss of AdSense revenue is insignificant. Google treats individual publishers like servers in a datacenter: they do not care if one is out. If you are a small company making a living for a couple of employees, Do NOT rely on Google for your revenue unless you are prepared to lose it instantly with possible confiscated of already earned money on your account.
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.
If you do not like an argument, factually refute it, rather than labelling its author. Otherwise your ad hominem style looks too much like Lenin's or Mao's
You must be joking. Any publically traded co these days is hardly family owned: the family members, in those rare example cases are by far the minority shareholders. Compare that with 100 years ago.
Let's see how many downvotes I get. The capitalism is no longer what it used to be due to the separation of ownership from control. IBM and Ford started as family businesses, passed from father to son. Who owned IBM 100 years ago? Watson did, then his son was a CEO. Who owns it now? Nobody, "shareholders", with an affirmative action hire guiding this mess as a CEO. Toyota was a family business too, largely owned by Toyoda family.
Why did the separation of ownership from control happen? Primarily due to the widespread use of birth control among whites. Franchised women consistently vote for the big government, for regulation and for the safety net. Big government actually disfavors small and hereditary businesses, since they are harder to control than a few concentrated anonymous conglomerates without real owners. Plus there are fewer capable sons in a nuclear family to pass a business on than a 100 years ago (also think about single moms here).
Reduced white fertility also led to replacement of the bulk of white work force with a lower IQ non-asian minorities (NAM) workforce. In the age of hi tech and automation, such work force is largely useless. They are kept occupied however, to reduce crime rates (think of Detroit riots of the 60s).
Additionally, the overall effect of women in the workforce is also counterproductive- more workplace drama than actual creative work.
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 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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.