Double Blind

I woke up today and received this email from Google, which I did verify to make sure it wasn’t phishing or otherwise fake:

Hello,

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.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

The only advertising I ever did on this site was when people specifically clicked on articles, they would get a text banner on the top of the page – this was good enough to net about US$100 every 2 years or so. Cumulatively, Google has cut me two cheques for just over US$100 since the Adsense program was open. Much to my amazement, the cheques were real and did not bounce. Google does have $24 billion in cash and equivalents on their balance sheet so that was more assurance when I went to the bank with cheque in hand.

I have click on the appeal link and filled in the appropriate information since I have no idea why Google would deem a low-volume operation like mine to be fraudulent – if I recall correctly my click-through rate was something like half a percent but the last time I checked was so long ago that my memory is fuzzy. According to my webstats (through Awstats that Bluehost provides), there are a few hundred people that read this site daily (for whatever reason, I don’t know) although I’d probably estimate that once you weed out all of the bots and spammers that you’re down to about 100 unique pairs of eyeballs daily.

While this loss of income is crushing, I will be able to survive. It probably works out for the people that read this site simply because there’s less spam on their computer screens to deal with.

If Google does reject the appeal, there is something wrong with their click-fraud processes (i.e. I am a genuine “false positive” according to their click-fraud algorithms) and I will endeavour to diversify my reliance on Google in the future – specifically my most vulnerable point electronically is my reliance on Google Mail and I want to be able to make sure that I can operate properly if something “stupid” happens to it. I also refuse to run Google Chrome since Google already runs most of my life, so I don’t want to be giving them my web browser in addition to my mail and reader.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.