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Comment by ganeshkrishnan | Hacker News Reader

I used to earn couple of thousands dollars a month via my Android games. I created them to learn unity and not to earn money but the games were picked up by some game magazines and took off.

Google then banned the whole account for some "likeness to merchandise" reason. They kept the whole money too

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I made about $200 per day and had 500 clicks per day from AdSense, steady for years. Suddenly it dropped to $30 per day and 1-5 clicks overnight. Traffic was consistent, about a million daily page views, and 40k active registered users a day. 1-5 clicks was clearly wrong. I contacted AdSense support and asked if I should try making changes to the ads, or wait for them to debug the issue. They said to wait.

Well, I waited a month as they escalated it to different departments, and someone went on vacation. Finally I get an email with their official answer. It says they can't tell me the issue, because it's classified information. However, I could try labeling the ads, "Sponsored Advertisements".

That's the great support I get after making them about 100k in commission. Thanks Google.

Which website?

I used to work for a company that ran entirely on adsense, (Directories and such) then Google changed the way websites ranked to be more social media friendly and every website tanked. Shares and likes became more important that keywords and semantics and the owner did not know how to adapt to the new SEO model.

> Shares and likes became more important that keywords

Many seem to think so. If true, it means that Google now "Pageranks" not thanks to websites contents maintainers establishing links to other sites, but to visitors posting links on social networks. They switched from the 'authors side' to the 'audience side'.

(Yes, there are many contents maintainers who also are active on social media, however they don't post the overwhelming majority of non-spam links published on social media).

I had a site that had 60k unique visitors a day. Adsense decided it didn't want to show ads on 90% on requests. I was making $150/month with server costs of over $500.

A company approached me to join their private ad network and the next month I earned $5700.

Website?

i made 1500$ from my Nokia phones related blogspot.com site before 2013,then Nokia lost market-share i lost my visitors & revenue.

before panda and hummingbird(mostly panda), SEO is very easy for self hosted WordPress blog, create some post and make more tags ,you easily ranked on google search.

*sorry for my english

I guess now-a-days blogspot/wordpress blogs don't rank in Google search results.

still possible, if u create Informative blog posts...

This happened to me a long time ago. I was banned for unclear reasons and lost more than $500. They never explained exactly why and I've been a happy user of ad blockers since, no exceptions.

I put some AdSense in my blog then earning like less than 100 bucks, but I left the money untouched, after a couple of years of inactive use of the account, Google sent an email and took my money. I was like WTF

Happened to me too. I lost almost $500.And then you keep getting automated mails about the account ban for each ticket.

Yeah I got click bombed I think after purchasing some sites on flippa. Maybe someone else wanted them more. out thousands of bucks plus a lifetime adsense ban.

plus the balance in ad sense which was not too much $100 or so.

Me too. I was making very decent money and opted to convert to Objective-C to see if Apple would approve one of my more popular apps. I couldn't gain any traction and didn't renew my developer account after the first year.

How did Google get away with scummy practice like this?

I joked that taking my money without explanation made for a fascinating legal spectacle. Its not that I care about the 400 euro, I'm honestly interested in their explanation in court. How an agreed exchange can be canceled by one party keeping the money. You can write whatever you like in a TOS legally its a joke, everyone knows this. I know it is no your decision but someone some day should have Google (you) explain for this business formula? or should that be theft? Who knows!

At that point they quickly restored my account. ha-ha

Also the thing is they don't provide an option to clarify the things.

Happened with me too.

Which games?

It was called Rickshaw Rage, Monster Truck Rampage, Plane Simulator. Around 2013. I can still see the gameplay on the game magazine sites.

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