Can anyone explain the business case for Adsense's no-contact banning policies? | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain the business case for Adsense's no-contact banning policies?

5 pointsthenomad4 comments

So, there's a lot of noise around Adsense account bans or suspensions right now, not least from me, and it's got me wondering.

Google are smart people. There must be a reason they're doing what they're doing.

But what they're doing is dropping 4, 5 and 6-figure sources of income, in their hundreds if not thousands, rather than send a single email.

As I said elsewhere, I speak from experience here. Adsense was disabled on my own site - which does about 600k page impressions a month - in late August, for some very vague reasons. I received a single email which copy-pasted a large section of the Adsense ToS, and that was it - ads disabled. No indication of what ad was breaking the rules, or even what rules I was breaking. No personal contact.

How on earth can a business justify dropping $10k+ a year in revenue without even making an hour's attempt to fix the problem? I know Google staff are highly paid, but I'm assuming most of them aren't on more than $10k ph!

Given this is far from a limited phenomenon, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Google have lost 7 figures - maybe even 8 figures - of revenue over the last few years by not being willing to have anyone get in touch with website owners.

I'm genuinely interested. What on earth would justify this as a business practice? How do you possibly make the case that it's not worth thousands of dollars to have someone send an email?

There must be some thinking here - I just can't figure out what it is.

Publishers are Google's product. The bans are a product quality assurance exercise for them.

They do not really lose any business when they cut out a publisher. They almost always have plenty of other options to display their inventory on.

So basically, whether they treat advertisers or publishers well is a function of whether they have too many advertisers or too many publishers?

Makes sense - although it does seem a bit like eating your seed corn. As and when the economy recovers and there's an online advertising boom, the balance may shift.

If too many people generate fake clicks, advertisers will no longer want to place expensive ads with Google. That loss could easily amount to 10 (or even 11) figures. Over 90% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Even a slight reduction in that revenue could cost billions.

If AdSense is associated with websites that contain copyright-infringing material, Google could find itself on the losing side of a gigantic lawsuit with the MAFIAA. That loss, too, could easily amount to billions.

If AdSense is associated with any other kind of content with questionable legality (child porn, hate speech, bomb-making tutorials, etc), there could be similar financial ramifications, or worse, damage to Google's brand. This can also be worth billions.

So it might make sense, from a purely financial point of view, to be overly aggressive in banning AdSense users. A few false positives might cost tens of millions of dollars, but that could be the lesser of two evils if the alternative is to let a few false negatives slip by.

Edit: As for lack of communication, someone at Google seems to think that letting people know too many details about exactly which page violates which policy would allow the bad guys to work around those policies, leading to more false negatives. Security through obscurity! Similarly, if you ever set up a mail server, you'll quickly realize that Google doesn't let you know exactly what you need to do to get rid of that pesky "via your.hostname.com" message. You could try adding DKIM and cross your fingers, but there's no guarantee. That's an anti-spam & anti-phishing feature, and Google doesn't want spammers and phishers to know its exact policies and algorithms.

According to Wikipedia [1], AdSense represents 28% of Google's ad revenue. But unlike ads placed in Google's own pages, Google needs to pay out the majority (~68%) of that revenue to website owners, so AdSense's actual contribution to profit is much lower than that. Google has plenty of other places where they can place ads far more profitably, even if a lot of third-party websites dropped AdSense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsense

Thanks - that's a great reply, and makes a depressing amount of sense.

In the case of page layout issues rather than click fraud, though, I still can't see why it doesn't make more sense to work with the publisher to achieve a layout everyone's happy with. I'm not sure what the bad guys could get out of knowing that Google doesn't like inline ads without a border, for example.

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