The nonsense about AdSense
April 10, 2006 1:14 PM Subscribe

TimesOnline Benjamin Cohen, the former teenaged dot.com millionaire, has run into a problem as he tries to make his next million: Google won't pay him for ads run on his website.
posted by archkim (40 comments total)

I dont like the idea of a teenage millionaire. I refuse to read any further.
posted by mert at 1:21 PM on April 10, 2006

Friends of mine whose company was bought by Google came up with the AdSense name. How many of my fifteen minutes does that use up?
posted by Slothrup at 1:24 PM on April 10, 2006

I am confused and saddened by the term "dot.com". It is reminiscent of such old standards as "ATM machine" and "PIN number".
posted by kafziel at 1:32 PM on April 10, 2006

This kind of reminds me of the rants you see when someones listing gets kicked off of ebay...
posted by Artw at 1:35 PM on April 10, 2006

Except ebay doesn't owe them £1,500.
posted by Roger Dodger at 1:38 PM on April 10, 2006

In seriousness though, it seems unlikely that google would be able to do this program while giving each publisher the personal attention they want. Automated advertising means automated banishment for people trying to mess with them. They can be oversensitive or undersensitive, and if they gave out things like IP addresses then they'd just be giving scammers more information on how to mess with 'em.

No real solution other then to let it work imperfectly. It doesn't seem fair because it's not. Nothing can be done about that. If you don't like it, don't use the service.
posted by delmoi at 1:38 PM on April 10, 2006

However google's system allows anyone with a grudge against a website to commit clickfraud and get them banned from AdSense.
posted by delmoi at 1:39 PM on April 10, 2006

Except ebay doesn't owe them £1,500. Paypal might.
posted by delmoi at 1:46 PM on April 10, 2006

As much as I hate to publicly take Googles side--as they are clearly being set up as the next Microsoft in many quarters--this is basically an anecdote by one guy who's having a problem with Google, so it's not really unbiased.

It's basically a teenager's google-sucks-blog-post, except the teenager is a dot-com millionaire (or former dot-com millionaire, which I assume means he was either only a millionaire on paper, or he spent all his money. I think it's the former) who was an overnight success (I love his article where he kvetches that pinknews.co.uk wasn't worth 5 million pounds overnight like his previous venture, Jewishnet.co.uk, which I have a hard time believing was ever worth 5 million pounds (link now redirects to another site...not sure if his original was dead, sold or what)).

So yeah, whatever.
posted by illovich at 1:49 PM on April 10, 2006

careful google... don't you know his daddy's a solicitor!?
posted by tnai at 1:50 PM on April 10, 2006

I dont like the idea of a teenage millionaire.

Really? I love the idea of teenage millionaires...provided they earned the money. It's teenage millionaires who inherited the money that irk me, because they always seem to be the trainwrecks. Give me a hardworkin' kid any day of the week -- millionaire or not.

heck, I'd rather have lunch with a kid who works at two part-time jobs to pay for college than Paris Hilton, just as a f'rinstance
posted by davejay at 1:58 PM on April 10, 2006

Now, after having read the article, I have to say he doesn't seem to be whining to me; I suspect complaints like this are going to become more, not less, common.

After all, if you don't get full accountability for all of the transactions under this system, you have to trust that Google* is handling everything legitimately and accurately -- and how is that better than record companies, say, whose artists are forced to rely on the company's accounting to determine royalties owed? There have been many instances, only some public, of the record companies taking advantage of this -- who's to say Google won't do the same?

*or other companies in the same business with the same policies
posted by davejay at 2:04 PM on April 10, 2006

Yeah, snarking about the teen-age millionaire aside, it looks like Google has a very strange business there. I understand they wish to keep their detection algorithm secret, but they can't even tell you what got you banned?

I smell a lawsuit at some point that I predict they will lose.
posted by illovich at 2:17 PM on April 10, 2006

Imagine my surprise when right after skimming this thread I checked my email and found one of these Adsense suspension emails from Google. Now, my website's been in Google's program for close on a year, with an average delta on the monthly income of over 100% at times. Sometimes it's way up, other times it's way down, probably because I don't actively promote it - as long as it pays for hosting I'm happy. Personally, I run adblock so I never see Google ads anyway.

I did notice in the past few weeks that I was suddenly getting lots of weird plastic surgery and cancer lawyer ads instead of the cheaper ads for ringtones and ebay, and my click-through rates had gone from 3-5% to 8-10%. I thought that was odd. Apparently, so did Google.

I think that by scaling rapidly, and trying to keep down costs by automating the process as much as possible and reducing staffing costs to a minimum, the Yahooification of Google is proceeding apace. It's convergent evolution. Once upon a time you could actually get someone at Yahoo to fix an account problem. Then Yahoo brought in a policy of basically ignoring all account questions. Google's current "no information, no response" attitude reminds me of that.
posted by meehawl at 2:18 PM on April 10, 2006

Hmm...

In 2005, Cohen took Apple Computer to the High Court in London over the ownership of the domain itunes.co.uk. Cohen effectivly lost the case, with the domain being transferred to Apple by Nominet. Cohen suggested he got an unfair deal from Nominet, because the case reviewer was a Mac user; "because in the view of the Respondent there is a 'cult' associated with the products of the Complainant, which attracts fanatical users"
posted by Artw at 2:20 PM on April 10, 2006

Artw : "This kind of reminds me of the rants you see when someones listing gets kicked off of ebay..."

I didn't realize people were so articulate in ebay rants.
posted by Bugbread at 2:25 PM on April 10, 2006

Huh, He sued Apple?
posted by delmoi at 2:36 PM on April 10, 2006

Details seem a little murky, but apparently he had ownership of itunes.co.uk, Apple complained to Nominet UK, who awarded them the site, Cohen then brought legal action against Nominet and lost. I'm not sure Apple was ever actually sued.

more and more...

This guy seems to attract murky and confusing internet disputes...
posted by Artw at 2:50 PM on April 10, 2006

He also seems to be a relentless self promoter.
posted by Artw at 2:54 PM on April 10, 2006

Um... From the end of the article: "Instead, I decided to sign PinkNews up to Yahoo!'s pay per click programme, carefully noting the right to speak to a real human being, 24/7, if we were unhappy with the figures they provided."

Too bad that according to the YPN Terms and Conditions (I assume he's talking about YPN -- I'm not aware of another Yahoo! PPC program): 11.l "You agree not to: display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US." As clearly a UK-based site, he would have a majority of non-US visitors.

A site I own got kicked out of the YPN program for violating this part of the Terms and Conditions -- and I'm a US-based business who just happened to get "too much" international traffic. YPN apparently requires that publishers do their own geographic-targetting and not show their ads to international visitors. A ridiculous requirement considering Yahoo! is in the best position to do this filtering themselves. And if you do get kicked out for violating the Terms you'll get the same treatment that Google gave him: You will not be given "evidence" of the infraction, there are no appeals, and you cannot be reactivated.
posted by crawl at 3:10 PM on April 10, 2006

How can Ben Cohen be a dot.com millionaire when he sold his share in SoJewish.com for £215,000?

Also, does he still run those porn search engines? Or is that what 'pinknews.co.uk' is?
posted by tapeguy at 3:32 PM on April 10, 2006

his complaints seem suspect, but I feel (as a dotcom businessperson) that Google needs to be watched closely. THe real question is, what happens to the "click fraud" when it comes to the people who were the actual victims? Are they compensated?
posted by cell divide at 3:42 PM on April 10, 2006

a) seduce people into running your ads
b) write a contract in which your metering of ads is insyndacable, so if you say there is clickfraud nobody can oppose
c) let the sucker run the ads
d).... ?
e) don't pay them
f) profit !
posted by elpapacito at 3:42 PM on April 10, 2006

it seems unlikely that google would be able to do this program while giving each publisher the personal attention they want.
Don't worry they receive all the attention they need, when they need to post the ads :) !

No real solution other then to let it work imperfectly.

No there is another, bitch about it so much that it influences Google service buyers

Oh delmoi you may want to fix your user page it still as the hax0000red details
posted by elpapacito at 3:46 PM on April 10, 2006

CPC for these is something like $50.

Yes, I suspect that is what triggered Google's alarm signals. I ran this, which is a list of Google's highest paying keywords that I got from here. Every link pointed back to google.com and it was zero content. Nevertheless, the ads Google was placing on the site (not just on that articles pages) seem to now feature cancer lawyers a lot more than they should.

I know that part of Google's ad allocation heuristic involves "quality" measured by how many times people click on a particular ad or class of ads on your site. I assume that because these cancer lawyer ads pay so highly that Google's placement engine is very eager to position them on websites, and once there they quickly displace other adverts because of their high CPC. So I guess that my monthly total, instead of fluctuating by 50-150%, probably shot up several hundred %, or more. This probably flagged some kind of alert monitor for low volume websites.

It does seem like a weird kind of systemic flaw, that an allocation engine will suddenly ramp up placement of insanely high paying ads in response to minimal content, while another engine monitors the resulting spike in revenue as a problem and suspends the account.
posted by meehawl at 3:52 PM on April 10, 2006

tapeguy : "Or is that what 'pinknews.co.uk' is?"

Pinknews.co.uk is an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual) news site.
posted by Bugbread at 3:52 PM on April 10, 2006

Kafziel: here's another old standard---"CHiPs Patrol."
posted by jayder at 4:36 PM on April 10, 2006

He's probably full of it.
posted by cellphone at 5:36 PM on April 10, 2006

As a side note, "Mesothelioma lawyer" Google ads have the distinction of being the highest cost-per-click in all of online advertising, according to something I read recently. CPC for these is something like $50.

Thank you for this information. I googled the phrase and I see that Verizon's SuperPages has bought ads under this keyword pair. Now, these are the same people who drop 12 pounds of advertising on my doorstep at least once a year in the form of yellow pages despite the fact that I am a customer of a different carrier. Now, by clicking that ad a bunch of times, I have presumably forced them to pay Google several hundred dollars, which I would not have done if they didn't insist on throwing a massive hunk of litter on my doorstep that I have to recycle. Justice was never so simple. Pity it's Google that gets the cash, though.
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:55 PM on April 10, 2006

Now, by clicking that ad a bunch of times, I have presumably forced them to pay Google several hundred dollars

And you may have just got someone's Adsense account automatically suspended...
posted by meehawl at 6:09 PM on April 10, 2006

Google is unlikely to suspend their own adsense account.
posted by George_Spiggott at 6:12 PM on April 10, 2006

With British libel laws being what they are, it'd be unwise to describe Ben Cohen as a huckster. I will, however, describe the hacks who get taken in by his vast array of dot-com schemes as either lazy bastards, or suckers of the highest order. Also, he's been known to spam. Still, the VAT jurisdictional thing is weird.
posted by holgate at 6:52 PM on April 10, 2006

Google is unlikely to suspend their own adsense account.

You never know what kind of crazy shit those dudes will get up to, they are very cutting edge. I heard that after Web 2.0 is over all the smart money is going to move into finding ways to kick yourself in the crotch.
posted by Divine_Wino at 7:32 PM on April 10, 2006

Eventually Web 2.0 will have sufficient powers that it will be able to travel back in time and over-write Web 1.0 before it even existed.
posted by Artw at 8:56 PM on April 10, 2006

(After it becomes self aware of course)
posted by Artw at 8:56 PM on April 10, 2006

Imagine my surprise when right after skimming this thread I checked my email and found one of these Adsense suspension emails from Google.

And now I got one. WTF? The only thing I can think is that the surge in traffic caused by my mention in Slate tripped some kind of alarm. It's ridiculous: ever since I reluctantly installed AdSense last fall, when I was really worried about money, I've been waiting patiently for my earnings to build up to $100 so they'd send me a goddam check, and now they're screwing me out of it. Bastards.
posted by languagehat at 11:40 AM on April 17, 2006

OK, nobody's reading this ancient post, but since comments are still open I feel obliged to update by pointing out that they eventually restored my AdSense account after I complained. No apology, of course, so I don't feel all warm and fuzzy about it, but I withdraw the "bastards."

Unless they do it again.
posted by languagehat at 9:32 AM on April 29, 2006

Don't feel lonely, lh, I'm still reading.
posted by Bugbread at 6:54 AM on April 30, 2006

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The nonsense about AdSense April 10, 2006 1:14 PM Subscribe

The nonsense about AdSense
April 10, 2006 1:14 PM Subscribe