They’re a one person company, and I assume their competitors are not exactly Google and Facebook either. Surely there’s enough market share at that level to allow for some compassion and basic human decency? Not everyone has to be ruthless 100% of the time
I used to work for a company as a dev that owned a few papers in various areas.
Our dev team was like any other company. You had a few senior guys that were good, some decent mid level, and one or two that did notbelong.
A few people mentioned what I saw in my short time at the company, the ad ops and sales folks came up with all these ad placements and IT had to work it in, with no regards to affects on UI.
The other thing I noticed was that the people in charge had a hard time during redesigns in removing elements that people had fought to add in the first place.
This was years ago for me, but as bad as it is losing the amount earned, it was just the lack of response when trying to understand why you were terminated. I had no idea why I was banned. I didn't employ any shady tricks. The only thing I noticed in the few weeks prior to the account banned was a higher CTR.
I actually emailed Adsense support at that time to let them know that it was out of the ordinary for my site.
Additionally, I also had an account on the CPA affiliate side of things with the same account that was banned because it was tied with the Adsense email account.
Same for me here. The lack of response was ridiculous. I would have loved to been told what was wrong or why the ban so I could at least try to resolve the issue somehow. But the only thing I received in return was that the decision was final. I noticed a higher CTR prior to the ban, but nothing else out of the ordinary.
I had Webmaster tools and Analytics on site, so after the ban I could still research backwards, and could not find anything that was out of the ordinary other than the CTR was just a bit higher.
Eh, it seems this is still a bit of a sore subject for me. I lost a good bit of income from this decision, and it hurt at the time. Looking back, I'm glad I don't gain income from this any longer. It just seems like a scam. I started out using my websites as a place to teach and inform and the different subjects I have knowledge and interests in. But trying to blend keywords in so that Google and the other ads I ran could get high quality "eyeballs" on my content really became an inauthentic experience.
If this will be a real legit business making money, 1500 isn't worth the risk of having to potentially pay 100x more when your business URL is known and thus may increase the value of the domain you are looking to buy.
In my case, I got extra lucky. I had an account their Google Affiliate Network (GAN) (moved between a 3-bar and 4-bar publisher monthly) as well that was canned because Google told me to combine my accounts.
Now, let's assume I was guilty of click fraud that they are accusing me of with Adsense, kicking me off GAN which was all commission based (% of an order from my sites) makes no sense at all to me from a business standpoint.
I had my account disabled last July and went through a similar experience in my appeal attempt. The interesting fact I pointed out to Google was that they sent me about 80 percent of my visitors via organic search. I didn't try to game the system or blend the ads to increase ctr or mislead consumers.
I offered to help diagnose the issue by going through server logs and anything else to no avail.
I guess when Google is making so much money from advertisers they rather just error on their side rather than spend time reviewing appeals.
Diagnosing an individual case probably costs them more than they make from it in years. But not investigating individual cases could carry a cumulative cost in terms of perception that could bring down the entire advertising ponzi scheme.
I used to work for work for a decent size newspaper company in a large metro area and they spent over 6 months to come up with a redesign for a home page that involved at least 4 or 5 different execs or managers in constant meetings, talks with an outside design agency about once a week. Oh, the 6 months only involved coming up with the mock ups not actual dev. That was a while another story with how much time was wasted on that.
So i imagine in a larger company, you would have more execs having constant meetings over a paywall, studies with how much profit they can make with pretty graphs to show how the stock price will jump because of the increase in earnings.
The state needs to figure out how to cut back. They keep looking for ways to tax or lease or sale state owned properties and eventually run out and realize that they should cut spending.
Depends on what "cut" means. It's been lower than projected, but still is higher than the previous year. The education budget, for example, is constitutionally prohibited from cuts; in fact, it's required to grow. The most recently decried "cut" that the teachers' union staged a strike over was really just their budget's growth being slower lower than they hoped.
If you have numbers on actual spending, year over year, then I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but I've not seen cuts anywhere in the sense of spending decreasing every year for four years.
