Daily Thoughts

Sign Our Petition To Google

My story started on September 9, 2008, when I posted an article on Hubpages speaking out against the sexy picture hubs that proliferate there. This evidently angered the owners of said hubs, and they started attacking everyone on Hubpages who had spoken out against that sort of posting.

I received a warning notice from Adsense on October 6 that my ads were found on a porn site. I wrote them back, explaining the situation, and they said they were aware of it, and that I should whitelist my adsense account. This consists of going in and designating only which sites you want ads to appear on. I had corresponded back and forth several times with adsense support, the last correspondence being on October 13, 2008, when I said I had whitelisted my account, but I was very concerned about the click-slamming. I never got a reply from them, and assumed they were aware of the situation, and would take care of it. Evidently not.

As soon as I whitelisted my account, the pornographers evidently started click-slamming my legitimate sites’ ads. I had been dealing with a personal crisis, and had not visited my adsense account in a few days to check the stats. Suddenly, today, I get a notice that my adsense has been disabled. Of course, I appealed, but from what I’ve heard, no one ever gets reinstated, so I’m not going to worry about it, although I had just started making a little money on adsense. I was waiting for my first check, which I should have received next month, and now I don’t even have a way to find out how much legitimate money was in my account, or if I will ever get paid.

This problem with stolen adsense codes being put onto porn sites is one Google is well aware of. Instead of going after the perpetrators, however, they are going after the victims! WHY? This is a question they refuse to answer, no matter how many times it is asked.

This is the text of the email I received notifying me that they had disabled my account. Evidently, many other people are receiving these too lately.

Hello <name>,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage
our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in
advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve
taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information
by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
——————————
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

Notice the words “your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers”. That’s a very strong statement, and since my account only made about $30-$50 a month, I don’t see where it could be any significant threat. Of course, Adsense will not tell you what sort of “significant threat” you’re creating for their advertisers. Seeing as most of their advertisers are spammers and get rich quick scammers anyway, I don’t mind posing a significant threat to those people.

The fact is this - Google is in financial trouble, just like the rest of America. The Alley Insider recently wrote about cost cutting at Google . Perks are always the first to go. But Google is talking about cutting back on hiring.

On October 20, in a Bloomberg interview , Eric Schmidt said that customers advertising budgets were “under stress”.

“All of us are vulnerable,” he said. “It’s a race between a contraction in advertising, which would affect everybody, and a very positive shift from offline to online.”

So is this really what this is about? Are they just disabling accounts that are starting to get paid? It seems that in the past, many adsense accounts have been disabled just as they were starting to be profitable. So is allowing users to dispaly adsense just a scam that Google is pulling off, which only allows you to have ads if you aren’t making any money?

All I know is that in my case, Google is victimizing a victim. I am the victim of some crazed pornographer, probably a mentally ill individual, who has nothing better to do than to try to ruin people’s lives. Not that losing my adsense account will ruin my life, but the whole thing is just so unjust that I’m going to suggest something here that I’m sure Google will not like.

I’d like to hear from everyone who has been affected by this wholesale disabling of Adsense accounts for unknown reasons. I want to get a lawyer involved, someone who will volunteer to represent the thousands of us who have been slammed down by Google with no reasonable explanation.

I have created a petition to demand that Google answer our concerns, and reinstate our accounts. You can sign our petition here.

It’s time we started standing up to these big corporations who think they can just do whatever they want to us with no repercussions! Someone in corporate America needs to start answering for their actions! If we stand together, we are a formidable force. Sign our petition today !

Trackback URI | Comments RSS