There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to the internet. Microsoft wishes it was them, Yahoo’s just had too much to drink, and there’s a big purple elephant in the corner — Google.

A Blogger’s Worst Nightmare

It’s a blogger’s worst nightmare. One day you open up your e-mail and receive a message from the Google AdSense team notifying you that your AdSense account has been disabled. Your heart sinks and your stomach is in your throat. The problem is we didn’t do anything. (I say we because La Disputa and Last Stop share an AdSense account.) The AdSense e-mail also provides little chance of recourse. Basically, they provide a link for “more information”. The link explains in roundabout ways that you were a risk to advertisers and then goes on to indirectly say that you committed click fraud. They don’t offer any details as to how they came to this conclusion. Suffice it to say, they have their ways.

Scrambling to get our AdSense account back we quickly filed an appeal. We didn’t know what to say, but we guessed and assumed that maybe our parents clicked our ads since we told them we make money on advertising on ads, but we failed to mention “please don’t click our ads”. The reason for this seems plausible enough, so we wrote up an appeal assuming that this must be it and said we fully support removing any earnings they deemed fraudulent and that we would be sure to always tell people not to click our ads in the future. We really thought we’d be okay, this was just a one-off thing. Heck, we started our blogs only a few months ago and our earnings were really insignificant. Two days later we get another e-mail saying our appeal was denied. And with Google, you only get one appeal. We were screwed. I’ve read other blogs saying sometimes people have gotten lucky on the second or third try, but this didn’t look good.

The truth is we probably made a mistake in assuming (you know what happens when you assume) when coming up with an excuse, as upon conferring with our parents, we now know they weren’t clicking our ads. But the truth was we didn’t know. In fact, we said that in our appeal. With Google’s lack of information, we probably will never know.

The Only Game In Town

In a haste to get advertising back, I scoured the net for AdSense alternatives. I knew Google was pretty much the best out there, but I didn’t know just how desolate the field really was. The only half-way decent options require a huge amount of traffic and the rest are absolute junk. You can tell just by looking at their website. And if you look at the big bloggers, they fully support diversifying your ad networks, but they make most of their money from AdSense. As far as blogs go, we were DOA.

I read up some more on Google Appeals and decided to try again. This time I took a more careful approach, I reviewed our traffic logs and found out that social networking spikes can trip off the google “invalid click detector”. I submitted our traffic logs and said that after conferring with our parents we realized they didn’t click on our ads. The appeal was very cordial and polite and we were hoping against hope we’d get our account enabled. It’s been several weeks.

And we never got a response.

No Warning

It’s strange, but being at the mercy of Google has been a rude awakening. It reminded me of a conversation I had where I argued that any company of large enough size eventually becomes evil. My roommate at the time, knowing I really liked Google, quipped, “How about Google and their ‘Don’t Be Evil’?”. I said, it’d happen eventually.

Eventually

No, I don’t think we’re their yet, but we are starting to see signs of Google increasingly not having the best interests of it’s customer’s at heart. Google has finally ceded censorship and privacy concerns in China and I know of several people who have many big complaints against the Big G. I think Google’s a great company, with some of the best engineers around, but there’s no denying that for Google (or any company) it gets harder and harder to not be evil the more money there is on the table. But this isn’t a story of Google being evil. It’s a case of poor service. Seriously, Google didn’t give us a warning saying they were starting to see invalid click activity. Hell, if they know what it is, why not remove it from our earnings? They never gave us a second chance and reinstated our account. We never physically spoke to someone. It was disabled. That’s it. No number to call, no e-mail address, just an appeal form and automated responses.

The Whole Internet at One’s Whimsy

I guess I’m glad it happened now. Imagine if this blog took off overnight and really started to rake in money. Now what if I quit my job to blog full-time only to find this all happen to me two weeks later? To understand the gravity of this remember that Google has my Social Security number and now that I’m blocked, I’m blocked for life.  This means I don’t have a good way to monetize any webapp I might come up with or another blog idea.  This can happen to anyone and it’s the primary reason why you should diversify your ad inventory. The problem is there really isn’t a good alternative. To even get to the point of blogging full-time, you really need Google. In fact, the internet is very largely dependent on Google. Not for search, but for AdSense. This is especially true when you consider the low-end. A startup today won’t qualify for the other “big” ad networks, they just don’t have enough volume. And without advertising, startups have a very chicken-and-egg problem. This can (and probably is) stifling innovation on the internet. With Google as it’s sole competitor in online advertising, who decides keyword pricing? Who decides pay-out ratios? Who decides whether you’re a risk or not? Certainly not the market.

No Competiton

Here’s a list of the options I’ve tried.

• Yahoo – They’re taking applications, but people on the internet are saying they’re not hearing back from them. It’s been this way for months. I know, I’ve tried too.
• Ask – They have an advertising platform, but I can’t find the sign-up page anymore. I don’t think it’s public. If someone else knows, please clue me in.
• Microsoft – You have to be a big player and they’re a similar to Yahoo, taking on little more ad inventory until they can figure out how to compete against Google.
• Clicksor – They sent me an e-mail saying my e-mail address was incorrect. I reapplied and fixed it and they haven’t gotten back to me.
• Bidvertiser – The only people who got back to me. I’ve set up my ads. I’ve earned zero dollars.
• I’ve tried a few others on this list, but I usually don’t qualify, or they’re too sheisty looking for me to try.

Effectively, there’s absolutely no competition. I’m not the first one to realize this. There’s a very good write-up here.

How Did we get Here?

Upset, I tried to figure out just why Google didn’t have ample competition in this space. It’s funny, because a few days later this article showed up on Slashdot. This article is a great explanation of the sordid love affair of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Basically, Yahoo controls the patent for contextual advertising. (Contextual advertising is nothing more than a patent on mining the advertiser’s page to discover it’s content and then placing a targeted ad on that website.) It’s an important patent and it’s orders of magnitude more effective at targeted advertising than just letting the website owner declare they’re content at sign-up. The crazy outcome of all of this is that, due to an undisclosed settlement, Google ended up the only person able to action on this patent even though Google doesn’t own it. This was absolutely eye-opening and one of the strangest patent stories I’ve ever heard of.

For the time being, it looks like we’re stuck with the unlikely monopoly.