Books of Note

Practical Common
LispThe best intro to start your journey. Excellent coverage of CLOS.

ANSI Common
LispAnother great starting point with a different focus.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence
ProgrammingA superb set of Lisp examples. Not just for the AI crowd.

Friday, January 20, 2006

"And just like that it was gone..." 

This email arrived yesterday evening:

Hello Dave,

Thank you for your response.

We have reviewed your circumstances and have reinstated your account, effective immediately. However, there will be a delay before ads start running on your website. It may take up to 48 hours before all of our servers are informed of the change.

Thank you for clarifying your situation. We appreciate your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, please feel free to respond to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Well, that's nice. It restores my faith in Google that at least there is somebody there metting out justice in some sort of way, albeit pretty anonymously. I still have no idea what triggered this event or whether it was really the clicks on my own Adwords which pulled the trigger somewhere. I guess I'll never know. But I'll never be clicking on my own Adwords again...

Do I fault the people at Google? The people, no. The system, yea, probably. Clearly, the fraud detection sensor needs some tuning. The humans handling the appeals seem to have at least a heart, if not names and faces.

That said, it's a hard problem. Google must deal with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of publishers and doing right by their advertisers requires that they aggressively jump on anything that appears fraudulent. I sometimes have the credit card companies give me a call asking me dumb questions about my buying habits, too.

What I would recommend to Google is that the process be tweaked such that you allow the appeal to progress forward while you're still serving ads for a publisher. While something is in dispute, it's fine to defer paying out the disputed earnings, but I could see it being painful for a publisher with a lot of traffic. This process took about 3 - 4 days to resolve. For me, that's about half a cup of coffee from Starbuck's in earnings. If I had a top blog, that could be several hundred, if not thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

Well, file this whole incident under experience...


Comments:


When you want to visit the pages which are advertised on your own site you can copy the link and then remove everything from it except the "adurl" parameter. Don't forget to remove the "client" parameter after it.
 

Post a Comment


Links to this post:

Create a Link

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?