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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

What can I say... Oh yeah, that Google owes me a lot of money after terminating my adsense account for false reasons and added insult to injury by sending me a 50€ adword voucher to my _physical address_ like it solved anything?...

It was like 10/15 years ago, now everytime I have an opportunity to suggest businesses I work with not to use any of Google services, including GCP, I do exactly that.

I'd say, unless you signed an actual contract with Google, which agreeing to a bunch of random TOS really isn't, do not ever rely on Google services or SAAS, and certainly do not build your startup on any Google stack.

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> now everytime I have an opportunity to suggest businesses I work with not to use any of Google services, including GCP, I do exactly that

What would you recommend as a good alternative to google (and Facebook) ads?

Reddit is like the #4 site in the USA. Can get pretty targeted too.

Good suggestion. Unfortunately Reddit is not that popular for the target demographic I have in mind (B2B in a Spanish speaking country).

Why do you say "(and Facebook)"? Even if Facebook were this ban-happy, a lifetime ban from them is way, way less disruptive to most people's lives than a lifetime ban from Google is.

I realise this is an edge case, but if you don't have an FB account but you set one up to create a page for your business and set up ads for it etc, it'll likely get shut down very quickly by FB's algorithms. So basically if you are a non-FB user you cannot use FB ads.

I personally dislike FB. I don’t have a FB/Instagram/Whatsapp account and would hate creating one just to run ads.

Unfortunately I feel like 90%+ of my target audience uses Google for search and at least one of FBs properties. It’s hard not to want to advertise on those platforms.

not using ads.... /runs

in all seriousness, I think in app purchases is probably a better model all round, As a user and a developer these ad platforms are all just nasty.

How would you leverage in app purchases to promote a B2B saas product?

If your product is B2B SaaS do you really need to put ads inside your app?

Of course not. In app purchases might make sense for someone that has an app once they already have a pretty good audience, but the issue is how to build that audience in the first place.

I was wondering if the person I was replying to had any insights on that, given they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google/FB ads. Maybe they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google adsense? Which wouldn’t apply to my use case.

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