Wednesday, November 18, 2009

$41 Is A Bottle Of Good Rum

Google fired me for invalid clicks. They didn’t go into a whole bunch of detail, but they felt they needed to protect their advertisers from me and my sinister forces.
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
They put ads on my site. People clicked them. They got pissed. There were – if I remember, since they’re gone now – about nine different advertisers on a single page. Just for math simplicity, let’s say those nine were the only advertisers, knowing they weren’t. We, my faithful minions, were able to cheat the Man out of $41 over the last two weeks. Split nine ways, and assuming a 60/40 split between Google and me in Google’s favor, those nine companies would be out $11 a piece. And I’m not getting my $41. I think this bought a little bit more than $11 worth of badwill for the companies involved. How is this not factored into the cost of doing business? It’s the internet. It can’t honestly be their expectation that only “interested buyers” will click on website ads. They’re glorified, slightly toned down spam, at best. They’re a way around pop-up blockers. The sites that were popping up were for washer/dryers, pools, and some other big ticket items. I’m willing to bet that fewer than two pools have been internet impulse buys in the last 9000 years. Guess who’s going to be badmouthing Google and AdSense for the rest of eternity. When Armageddon happens I’m going to make a point of finding the guy on the pale horse and sending him towards Google headquarters. If I see these people in Heaven I will push them of their clouds. I wouldn’t be upset if I was running a scam, if I had some kind of robot clicker racking up hundreds of thousands of clicks. Getting caught would just be part of the game, but I was getting thirty clicks a day. What the hell kind of red flags did that trigger? I’m guessing none. I’m guessing some asshole in some asshole center, making more than $41 every two weeks, that reviews new accounts, decided my readers were clicking on too many ads. I wish to convey negative sentiments towards you. I would be more descriptive but that would upset my wife. Hot chainsaw sodomy, that’s all I’m going to say. It’s also going to be easy to boycott the companies' ads that were on my site, because I was pimping stuff that I liked. Guess who’s an Asics fan now?

2 comments:

MJ said...

I'm not ready to comment on this yet. I was a little excited about the 41 dollars and I wish I would have read your TOS so I'd know not to click that oatmeal ad and the sears one too. I didn't see any Nike ads.

Beth said...

I like how, at the end, they say, "if you have any questions, too f-ing bad, don't try to email us back." I was actually looking at one of the ads for a balance bike. It looked kind of cool, and I even bookmarked the site. Oh well. You should look into Wordpress.