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So you're saying he was smart enough to grow this revenue to 2000/month, but, in the meantime forgetting something that basic - and the system caught up with him? If so where was the system before?

There have been big swings in advertiser behaviour in the last few years. One big advertiser changes their policy to "no longer include sites about LGBT issues", and suddenly a blog about that could see revenue drop 90%.

In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space.

Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT.

It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society.

Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.

Should it also be a requirement for the government to posts what preferences you look for in a partner on dating websites, what gender you prefer when searching for doctors, what race you prefer when looking for cleaning or child care assistance?

This is a ghastly and inhumane comparison.

Companies aren't people.

Oh no, you have hurt the companies' feelings!

I think it is more ghastly and inhumane to think that companies that choose not to market to those they disagree with are somehow doing them a disservice by not marketing to them. They are doing them a favor. It would be completely different if they were saying they couldn't shop there, just like if you intentionally look for women doctor's to tell them that you think they are inferior or if you look for dark skinned people on dating websites to tell them you don't like their race. I personally see no positive effects from advertising whatsoever, and am better off if a company thinks I'm too old or whatever to sell their product to.

While I agree, it's also possible that certain ideologies don't actually lead to revenue from advertising in practice. If I'm selling a line of Jewish labelled clothing, then it doesn't do me much good to include pro-Islam sites in advertising. And although the above is a rather specific strawman, there are many other areas of advertising, companies and products that don't have broad appeal in a given category.

As a potentially better example, if a higher than typical number of LGBTQIIAA+ are likely to be vetegarian/vegan, then excluding them from meat based product advertising might be better use of dollars spent.

Just because an advertiser doesn't want to advertise among contentious groups doesn't mean they are being bigoted about their targeting, it likely comes down to not being worth it due to limited response from those markets.

Companies are groups of people, ranging in size from 1 to many.

A few million companies are 1 person:

http://www.smbceo.com/2011/03/14/25-million-small-businesses...

Not sure if they are people though

> In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space.

Prior to ad networks that automatically match advertisers to display space, yes.

The thing is, though, prior to ad networks, there were a lot fewer advertisers who were interested in spending time and money on doing this song and dance with a slew of tiny web properties. Most of them wouldn't even bother.

You can have no ad networks, or you can have a long tail of low-prominence websites earn ad revenue. Pick one.

Before ad networks, we had a longer tail of low prominence newspapers and magazines than we do now.

1. Low prominence newspapers made most of their money from classifieds. Craigslist ate that business.

2. A low prominence local newspaper has local businesses advertising in it. Your local auto mechanic on Walker Street will buy an ad in a local paper, but they aren't going to spend a penny to advertise directly on your website, even if it has the same readership #s as the paper. Because 99.9% of your website's visitors aren't within driving distance of their location.

The ad network [1] solves problem #2, by making it possible for geographically-constrained businesses to buy ad inventory on websites that only get a handful of clicks from their geographical area.

Yes, ad networks introduce plenty of problems, as people in this thread point out. [2]

No, nobody will advertise on your 1,000-50,000 reader/day website without going through an ad network. Small advertisers aren't going to pay anything for an untargeted impression, and large brand advertisers aren't going to waste their time [3] on so few impressions.

[1] I am speaking about the industry as a whole.

[2] I could mention a few other problems that people in this thread haven't pointed out, too, but that's neither here nor there.

[3] Not to mention that without going through an ad network, and by directly dealing with the website operators, making reports of your ad spend + ROI becomes a colossal pain in the ass. People who work for large advertisers are just trying to do their job, and their job consists of making their boss happy. Something that does not make their boss happy is being unable to quickly say how much money they spent, and what they got for that spend.

Can we have no ad networks please?

You're assuming that it was Google's system that changed, and not their primary ad buyers.

No, he was smart enough to do whatever he did but lucky enough to get that payout. Over time, someone will always optimize for SEO, AdSense & shareability better.

Perhaps their entire strategy was accidentally optimizing for a keyword that was highly valuable for a short while, who knows?

For a short while YouTubers would mention getting a mortgage in the middle of their video just to improve the rate by tricking the algorithm into showing expensive mortgage related ads.

But people will always prefer to blame others and when you can blame a corporation for your problems its always an easier target.

While there is truth in your statement, can you be sure it applies to the GP's story?

Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system? Capping could have been done by a service created by a team you wouldn't have access to and without knowledge something like that even exist (and rightfully so, as it would take one whistleblower to harm the business). So I am not surprised you would write that there was no such facility.

> Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system?

Near enough, yes. Sure, there are millions of lines of code, and I did not read every one, but I debugged enough issues that I'm sure I would have come across this capping effect if it existed and affected more than some dormant/test accounts.

It's possible to implement something like this and you wouldn't be able to find out, as a service sitting between the network and ad servers, it could even be embedded in an innocent looking load balancer. Why would you think something like that wouldn't exist?

Why would Google, internally, implement a feature as if they were maliciously attacking their own systems?

So they can not pay the content providers and pocket the advertising money?

Not saying that's what happened but there's definitely motive.

They could use that to suppress funding to websites that are not in line with Google world views and boost funding to websites aligning with their views. They could also use this to help website competitors who pay for ad words. My traffic also got down once I stopped paying for ad words, but the increase of traffic I was getting from ads, was nowhere near the size of the drop after I stopped using it. Then they capped the ad sense.

I've had similar issues with AdSense. Running a site for 10 years, and it was earning $250/day for years, then suddenly it dropped. For a while I had the same traffic and instead of 500 clicks a day Google would say I had 3 or 4 clicks. I contacted them, waited a month, and they said to label them "Advertisements" so users are not confused.

Well, my site is mostly text based and I have at least 50px of space around any advertisement, so they stick out like a sore thumb and are not confusing. Eventually the daily clicks returned, but then in the last year Google started taking back 80% of my revenue at the end of the month saying it's "Invalid Traffic". This is after years of it being around 5%. I've made no changes to the site, all the traffic is organic from Google search or direct visitors. I've never once in my life paid for traffic.

I contacted Google again, but they refused to give any information because they can't share specifics for security reasons. So, I'm left losing 80% of my revenue this year and instead of making about 50k after my bills, I'll break even or make a loss.

Since then I tried switching to another company that's an AdSense partner. Of course they take a commission, but apparently they can actually show me the daily earnings with "Invalid Traffic" removed, and not give me a monthly heart attack and remove all my revenue as a surprise at once.

So, I can see how little I'm making on a daily basis now, but I'm no closer to resolving the issue because Google refuses to give any answers, so I'm completely on my own and taking shots in the dark.

The other week I tried building a database of 800 million IP addresses using lists of all IP addresses from datacenters, VPNs, proxies, TOR exit nodes, and IPs flagged as abusive. This obviously took some time to setup and I stopped showing ads to these IPs because maybe they're bad sources of traffic? That didn't seem to help.

Then I tried setting up some Javascript to not load ads until the mouse moved or a user scrolled. Maybe that would help to prevent any traffic where a user is not at the computer? Nope, didn't work.

So, I'm out of ideas. Yes, I have ads.txt configured. Yes, I have a consent manager configured.

> Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more.

What you said sounds simple. However, like I said, Google can randomly drop my clicks from a consistent 500 a day to 3 and give no answers. Or, they can tell me I'm earning $250/day and then when it comes time to pay a month later, they say they can only pay $50/day and the traffic didn't meet their standards. That's a big problem when they just spent the entire month outbidding all my other advertisers.

Lastly, the site I run is filled with great people. It's a community based website with tens of millions of comments. Users on average spend 10 minutes per session, the bounce rate is incredibly low, the average user loads 30 pages a day. People like it, it's full of quality content and posts, and users are writing new comments every few seconds.

> The other week I tried building a database of 800 million IP addresses using lists of all IP addresses from datacenters, VPNs, proxies, TOR exit nodes, and IPs flagged as abusive.

This isn't going to work well... Both Google and many advertisers will send bots to your site to scan the content. If they see javascript shenanigans going on affecting ad presentation, they'll do something between not advertising (reducing revenue) or permabanning you...

"Invalid Traffic" is nearly always some dirty business going on - either by you, or by one of your users, or a competitor, or even someone totally random hoping to blend their fraud in with some legit sites like yours.

If I were you, I'd hunt your logs for botlike behaviour and close any associated user accounts.

But maybe you don't have to be logged in to see ads? If so, then maybe changing that feature could help. Or at least show a majority to only logged-in folks.

but then in the last year Google started taking back 80% of my revenue at the end of the month saying it's "Invalid Traffic"

I wonder if they returned the money to the advertisers.