How Google surprises me
Imagine the following conversation between you and a police officer:
Officer: “You’re arrested. You broke the law”.
You: “Excuse me? What have I done?”
Officer: “I can’t tell you - that would be against our internal rules. If you think you’re innocent, try to convince us that someone else could be responsible for your crime.”
Sounds dada to you? It does to me, too. But that is exactly how Google treats customers.
I am both an AdSense and an AdWords customer. That means, I pay Google for putting up my ads on websites, but I also let Google pay me for putting up their ads on my websites.
This website attracted quite some traffic in the past two weeks, due to an applet that generates graphs out of the HTML structure of any webpage. As much as I appreciated the popularity of the applet, the bandwidth costs made me feel a bit uneasy, because I had to pay about 20$ per day for bandwidth alone (the applet is almost one megabyte, and I had > 30'000 visitors per day). The Google AdSense programm was great, because it could finance part of the bandwitdh costs (about half). So far, so good.
On monday, I received the following email from Google (translated from german, into a very short version):
“We have noticed invalid clicking activity on your websites, and we have deactivated your account. Publishers whose accounts were deactivated due to invalid clicking activities are not allowed to take part in the AdSense program in the future. The money will be refunded to the advertisers.
Best regards,
Your Google AdSense Team”
Uhm, well, uhm, scuse me??? I wrote them an email saying, well, there must be a mistake, please tell me what’s going on here.
One day later, I got the following email:
“According to our internal rules, we cannot give you any details about the invalid clicking activities on your websites. If you can convince us that you are not responsible for the invalid clicking activities, you may raise an objection. Please provide us with the following data:
[A long list of questions]”
If there has been any invalid clicking activity, then frankly I don’t know about it. But that is not even the point here. It's also not about the money. I can live without the couple of dollars Google paid me, and this whole thing would upset me even if there was no money involved at all. It's about a much more general thing. What is happening is that someone must prove his innocence without being allowed to know what the charge is.
When things like that happen to me, I tend NOT to write something on the blog, because I'm much too emotional, and after one or two days, things have calmed down, and I would regret my public rambling (Yes, I had another title for the story in mind two days ago... but I try to avoid those four letter words, specifically in titles). This story, however, makes me more angry with every day that I think about it.
I don’t know, but maybe Google has spent too much time in China lately. Ok, I'm getting cynical now, but this type of treating your customers is *way* beyond anything I have ever experienced. Ever.
Officer: “You’re arrested. You broke the law”.
You: “Excuse me? What have I done?”
Officer: “I can’t tell you - that would be against our internal rules. If you think you’re innocent, try to convince us that someone else could be responsible for your crime.”
Sounds dada to you? It does to me, too. But that is exactly how Google treats customers.
I am both an AdSense and an AdWords customer. That means, I pay Google for putting up my ads on websites, but I also let Google pay me for putting up their ads on my websites.
This website attracted quite some traffic in the past two weeks, due to an applet that generates graphs out of the HTML structure of any webpage. As much as I appreciated the popularity of the applet, the bandwidth costs made me feel a bit uneasy, because I had to pay about 20$ per day for bandwidth alone (the applet is almost one megabyte, and I had > 30'000 visitors per day). The Google AdSense programm was great, because it could finance part of the bandwitdh costs (about half). So far, so good.
On monday, I received the following email from Google (translated from german, into a very short version):
“We have noticed invalid clicking activity on your websites, and we have deactivated your account. Publishers whose accounts were deactivated due to invalid clicking activities are not allowed to take part in the AdSense program in the future. The money will be refunded to the advertisers.
Best regards,
Your Google AdSense Team”
Uhm, well, uhm, scuse me??? I wrote them an email saying, well, there must be a mistake, please tell me what’s going on here.
One day later, I got the following email:
“According to our internal rules, we cannot give you any details about the invalid clicking activities on your websites. If you can convince us that you are not responsible for the invalid clicking activities, you may raise an objection. Please provide us with the following data:
[A long list of questions]”
If there has been any invalid clicking activity, then frankly I don’t know about it. But that is not even the point here. It's also not about the money. I can live without the couple of dollars Google paid me, and this whole thing would upset me even if there was no money involved at all. It's about a much more general thing. What is happening is that someone must prove his innocence without being allowed to know what the charge is.
When things like that happen to me, I tend NOT to write something on the blog, because I'm much too emotional, and after one or two days, things have calmed down, and I would regret my public rambling (Yes, I had another title for the story in mind two days ago... but I try to avoid those four letter words, specifically in titles). This story, however, makes me more angry with every day that I think about it.
I don’t know, but maybe Google has spent too much time in China lately. Ok, I'm getting cynical now, but this type of treating your customers is *way* beyond anything I have ever experienced. Ever.
Comments
I'm sorry google is behaving that way ... they really do have a lot of very good people working for/with them. Did you go through the process of filing out the questions? I'm thinking that might have given you some inkling about the illegal behaviour.
BTW I happened onto your applety by way of jwz's "WebCollage", the LiveJournal version ... someone had graphed their site and it jumped right out at me, sooooo pretty!
see http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/
Posted by: Ben Tremblay | 09.06.06 02:46
I feel your pain Sala. I'm the web guy for a HL2 mod called Dystopia and recently went through this exact same drama with Google.
Very interestingly it only happened after we'd requested our first pay out (US$600).
After a lot of automated responses I finally got an email from what I think was a live human who basically told me the same thing their scripts do; piss off.
With no explaination or information...
For company that pride's it's self on "do no evil", when it comes to money I trust google about as far as I can throw them.
Posted by: Fuzzy | 09.06.06 13:21
Google, no matter how much you try not to people are going to start loving to hate you and say that they are a google ads free site to NOT drive away customers.
I think I'm going to do just that with my sites.
Posted by: Ali | 09.06.06 21:31