Google, p2pnet: Adsense saga
p2p news view / p2pnet: Money really does talk, and radically different standards of right and wrong are applied depending on how much of it you have.
If you’re Google, say, you can get away with stuff you can’t even dream about if you’re a lesser entity.
You can, for example, refuse to pay what you owe, as a small blog called Beat King has just discovered,
To step back a little, Google exists largely because it’s able to pull in billions of dollars by convincing advertisers they can reach desirable demographics – that’s you – through various ’services’.
When Google kicked off, its motto was Do No Evil and it was perceived as being a genuine Net nice guy, clean and wholesome. Sadly, though, the image no longer pertains and the company now stands firmly within the ranks of huge multinationals whose sole purpose is to accumulate money. Lots of money.
Back to the point, p2pnet survives (barely) from $ brought in from advertisements, and the ad strip on the right, now occupied by the Kazaa vs p2pnet button, used to carry AdSense panels.
The income never amounted to much, but when you don’t have a lot, it all counts. But we didn’t like Adsense and tried to weed out the numerous obviously dodgy and tacky ads.
Then at the beginning of the year, two things happened: the panel suddenly went blank and Google deliberately, and as publicly as possible, tried to humiliate p2pnet.
The box at the top of the page used to be a Google Search for p2pnet. But suddenly, when readers tried to search p2pnet all they saw was:
Forbidden – Your client does not have permission to get ********* from this server. Client IP address: xx.xx.xxx.xxx
The website you’ve just visited has tried to provide you with search results from Google. Unfortunately, the site violates our terms of service so your search could not be completed.
Nice.
Google was accusing us of being consciously dishonest, claiming we’d been generating false clicks.
We hadn’t been doing anything of the kind, and wouldn’t have known how even if we’d wanted to. But Do No Evil Google made the claim without any attempt to discover if it was true. And it’s blankly refused to offer an explanation of how it arrived at its completely erroneous conclusions. It hasn’t even had the courtesy to answer p2pnet emails and has flatly refused to pay the tiny amount of money it owes us. We even emailed Google ceo Eric Schmidt, but he didn’t bother to respond either.
But all this will seem all too familiar to the guys who run Beat King.
“Some of you might have noticed that the ads at the tops of our pages have been missing lately,” says a blog post. “”This is because Google Adsense is a fraud.
“Our ad income has had a slight increase of late, and Google has falsely accused us of fraud, and has frozen our account. Other sites have had the same problem. We are looking into other methods. We really weren’t making much from it anyway. Basically just more or less enough to pay our web hosting fees. My recommendation to everyone is a total boycott of all Google products and services.”
p2pnet and Beat King are not, however, alone. Far from it, in fact.
Google also refused to pay the former teenaged dot.com millionaire Benjamin Cohen for ads run on his site, Off The Top of my Head blog was blocked (”I wuz banned frum assent for no reason!” – the site said at the time. “How do I get my acct back Plzzzz Help!!!”), a large commercial p2p company we know of had the same experience, and we’re sure there are plenty of other examples.
And Google continues to get away with it.
But the crowning irony from p2pnet’s perspective, is: Google is still promoting Adsense to us.
Last month we had an email saying, “We’re writing to let you know about a coming change to the appearance of your Google ads,” going on, “We’ve found that many publishers prefer the cleaner look of this palette and have also seen that a blended color palette performs better for them – attracting user interest while still maintaining the distinction between ads and content with the ‘Ads by Google’ label’.”
Google is also plugging its new Google Analytics service and for a laugh, we applied, clearly using the p2pnet email addie and on June 8, received, “We’re happy to inform you that your unique invitation code is now available. Please choose the option below that applies to you and follow the instructions to create your Google Analytics account. Once you’ve done so, please refer to our Installation Guide to help you get started.”
Stay tuned ; )
(Thanks, method77)
Digg this story.
Also See:
dodgy and tacky – Google yanks p2pnet ads, February 1, 2006
answer p2pnet – Google yanks p2pnet ads: II, February 4, 2006
refused to pay – More Adsense click fraud BS, April 11, 2006
wuz banned – Adsense, p2pnet and ‘fake clicks’, February 11, 2006
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June 17th, 2006 at 9:11 am
We took off the post for now over at Beatking until we see what they answer the email (if they answer) so the link takes you to the main forum index.
We will have a discussion sometime next week over there and I’d like to see people’s opinions and stories about adsense. Perhaps start a huge boycott movement or something.
June 17th, 2006 at 11:08 am
my sister sells my software via ebay (i hate ebay to death) but i let her do it to make some extra money for herself. A few months back ebay shut down all her bids and emailed everyone that had bid or purchased from her that they may have purchased pirated software.. via their ebay store. They made claims that “the copyright owner had contacted them complainin”.
Lo and behold; i am the sole copyright holder for the product and never once contacted them about it. Obviously.
Her listings even had links pointing directly to the products homepage with a special ebay information page just to describe the legitimacy of her as a seller.
A few days later after we received half a dozen emails from the buyers about the “fraud”; ebay put her auctions back and never said another word about it. Meanwhile you can buy a 9GB DL DVD with 10,000 plugins and cracks for photoshop for 4$.
Imagine my surprise!
i had similar experience while advertising on google. affiliates of mine generate sales through there but i wouldn’t put my own money on it again.
June 17th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
My site has dropped google ad’s because of what happened to p2pnet, scaredmonkeys (another fraud claim) and gone bananas . com\net’s.
The even sent me an e-mail saying in a round about way, we noticed your ads are not displaying! This MUST be an error!
No it isn’t broken, I just want a fair web and IN MY OPINION their adsense practices are simply unfair.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Help our troll build Jon’s defense Fund.
When Gachnar posts, donate.
Small amounts work without any problems, ( I have
personally tested amounts as small as 25 cents ).
Every one of thoses small donations DO add up.
We don’t have to be wealthy, or go broke, to make a
difference,
and we CAN make a difference.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:55 am
I agree, I’ve had similar bad experiences with Google. Their arrogance is incredible. They do things without explanation, then just refuse to answer emails. If you do eventually get a response it’s likely to be a canned answer, that’s generic to the point of being useless.
This behaviour is what I’d expect from a holier than though company with a motto such as Do No Evil. They know best, end of story.
I find this absolute certaintanty deeply scary.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:04 am
Hi there,
The problem as I see it is you can’t fight them and if you could you can’t win, so what is the point in wasting your time?
I think the best thing to do is to make sure you check you account regularly if someone as clicked on your ad lets say 30 or 40 times report it to Google.
If you are getting a lot of traffic to you site or blog but your adsense ads are not paying you much you need to configure your ads a bit better.
Lee
May 18th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Hi Lee:
“check you account regularly”
What account? I don’t have one and Do No Evil won’t say why
Cheers!