Why Google Will Never Get Another Dime of my Money

Google Money Signs

It all started about 2 months ago. I was running my Adsense account as I had been for the past 5-6 years. I’d cut down my Adsense display over the past few years because other revenue sources pay better. AdSense was only running on a couple of smaller blogs and forums I have. Certainly, I wasn’t breaking any records in terms of revenue but I was making enough to get a payment once or twice a year.

In February, a client of mine came to me and explained that he got his AdSense account banned for buying traffic and AdSense was an important revenue stream for him. If he stopped buying traffic could he use my account in exchange for 10% of the money. I said, “I’m not greedy so long as you’re still throwing me work we’ll make it 5% and deduct the other 5% off your monthly invoice.” That was settled. I went in, created ad zones, and replaced the code on his site with my code.

All in all, we were running Adsense on about 20 sites and I watched as the revenue climbed to $60, then $70, finally it topped off at about $110 per day and fluctuated from there. I was pretty pumped.

All was good as far as I knew. Within 6 weeks the balance was up to $2,700. Until in mid-March I got an account disabled noticed. Naturally, I went the appeal route and within 4 hours I got another email back saying my account had be reviewed and was still found to out of complaince, and that they could not reinstate my account, blah, blah, blah.

I have no reason to doubt my client. We’ve worked together quite a while and he’s never been dishonest with me. If he says he wasn’t doing anything shady then he wasn’t.  What irks me is Google is so damn convoluted in their explanation, in fact there was no explanation other than ‘invalid click activity’. No expounding, nothing, citing “protecting their AdWords clients”.

What irks me even more so is that the appeal process is closed off. You get one form to fill out, submit, and then you get a message that someone will get back to you. 4 hours later, appeal denied. Google, do you expect me to believe, even for a second, that at the scale you do business, a human being went over my appeal in 4 hours?

The real kick in the teeth is the fact that I’ve been a loyal publisher for 5-6 years. All that out the window. No, “Hey you screwed up but promise not to get it again and we’ll reinstate your account”  Nothing, just a “We think tou’re a cheat so fuck you that money is gone” we’re supposedly returning it to our AdWord’s clients.

You see Google, I’m not missing that couple hundred a year it’s the principal of just throwing a long standing relationship out the window with no human contact or explanation. So, here’s a fuck you back. You will never get a dime of money, I will no longer run AdWords campaigns for myself or clients. I will never buy an MP3 or Android app from your store nor will I ever click on an AdSense ad again. You can suck the big one as far as I’m concerned.

Golden Nuggets of Information

Gold nugget

photo credit: Markusram

Every once in a blue moon while reading an article you unexpectedly come across a nugget of information that solves a big problem for you.

Recently, I started reading Patrick O’Keefe over at Managing Communities after seeing a post about him on a forum administrator’s community. The Managing Communities blog is great for anyone who manages communities. Of course Patrick, covers some of the basic stuff for newbies but I really like that he tries to tackle the not-so-cut-and-dry topics like the potential member troubles of merging two forums. Anyone can write about the technical aspect. No matter how daunting the merge may seem from a technical standpoint, it’s really the easy part. Integrating two communities is daunting from a member standpoint. I like his blog so much that I bought the book for my Kindle.

Anyway, this isn’t a review of the Managing Community Blog. Forgive me, I got a little side tracked. My point is Patrick posted about Pinrest’s disrespect for Flickr member copyrights. Which I agree on 100% BTW. During the past week or so I’ve seen no less than 50 articles come across various streams about Pinrest’s disrespect for copyrights. It got boring very fast. I was a split second away from just skipping the article in Google Reader.

Good thing I didn’t skip the article! Patrick dropped a golden nugget in the Pinrest post:

This blog is powered by WordPress and I use a plugin called Photo Dropper.

One sentence buried 12 paragraphs into the article changed the way I run my blogs. This is big!  If I had just skipped over Pat’s post, I may never have known about Photo Dropper.  Pictures and images capture attention. It’s imperative that bloggers add images to their posts. Lot’s of higher end custom themes even require a featured image be set or else the site doesn’t look very good.

The trouble is finding images is a pain unless you’re reviewing a product. Sure there are some stock image sites but the quality isn’t always there. There’s always Google Image search which lots of people do and I resorted to a few times but the fact of the matter is those images aren’t free for the taking. Emailing site owners for permission just takes too much time and you will find many times they don’t even have the rights to the image they’ve posted.

Photo Dropper fixes all this and I wouldn’t know about it if I’d just skipped over the “whining photographers” post.