Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won't touch Google's Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don't think it's possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.
when it comes to customer support
I eventually gave up and bought an iPhone and it was ironically the best thing that could have happened in that scenario.
Two effective strategies I have seen are:
(1) Contact a friend who works at Google and show them the comical chain of correspondence showing how your simple, silly problem got even sillier over time. Convince your friend or friends to show an interest in the problem internally.
(2) Write a blog post about the problem and circulate it on social media (news.ycombinator and /r/programming front pages seem to work great).
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Their free services have no direct support channels, as expected. I wouldn't provide free support for free services either.
I've received excellent support from Google for GSuite/Google Apps and Google Cloud over the years, both via chat and calls, usually out of their Ireland office.
I live in Fiji and my account with them isn't worth all that much (~$100/month).
Up to this day, I pretty much avoid all Google services except a forwarding Gmail account, Youtube, and some searches. I also continuously recommended anyone who asked my advice to avoid Google (even more than Facebook.) I've been doing this for the last 10 years already.
Good riddance Google. Your Ad-Sense support was quite frankly, customer unsupport.
No way for me to even try to prove that it wasn't me doing anything.
I had been spending a bit of money on AdWords for my law office website at the same time. Stopped that right away. It was my futile and meaningless attempt at retribution, of course. :)
> It was my futile and meaningless attempt at retribution, of course. :)
Don't say that! Each journey starts with a single step, as frustrating and futile as it may seem. And as this thread shows, many are already marching in the same direction. When enough frozen raindrops merge, even mountains move.
Anecdata: My customer experience with Google has been "OK" (a small paid G Suite account). I have no expectation of free support for their free services.
It took me months to slowly watch it rise up to the $100 threshold and I was thrilled to get my first ever ad revenue check, small as it might be. Only to have it taken away after I had given them my personal information.
Free ad space for Google, accusations of having a click ring for me (would have been a pretty pathetic ring if was anyway).
/vent
Nowadays I’m trying to avoid using any hosted services at all due to that (and later, similar) experiences.
Basically a big fuck you to Google: "give me all the data you have on me or I will report you and you may be on the hook for 4% of your revenue".
It appears that Google did something different this time, I don't know what.
The problem lies with our justice system though. If it were more efficient we'd have less things like self-censorship and self-moderation.
Seriously?
$11M is about 1 hr of Google's revenue (365 x 24 x 11/100000 = 0.96)
EDIT: This actually reminded me of that post a few days ago on HN, about the guy comparing foxes and racoons with some companies in the financial industry, and how some could be winning at the game but losing at the meta-game. Google should be more careful with its meta-game.
But a $600+ billion dollar company that steals millions of dollars from thousands of publishers? $11 million . It's as if they measured it down to the penny exactly which is rare because often you see these huge settlement numbers like for tobacco companies, where it seems excessive. But the case where there are the most victims and the most hurt victims and victims that are the most innocent gets the most pathetic, most measured payout. It's the exact opposite of the frivolous lawsuit.
One day our AdSense account was disabled, no warning, no nothing. We had never resorted to a single 'trick' or 'hack'. Nobody at Google could even tell us what exactly we were supposedly accused of.
After months of escalation, the final word was "we cannot tell you what you have allegedly done, we will not re-instate your account, you may not appeal any further".
However, I didn't give up. I was eventually able to convince them to give me proof by being extremely annoying and repeatedly e-mailing the CEO and others in the company until they relented.
The "proof" they had was one of the most ridiculous misunderstandings of how the web works that I've ever seen; it's as if their click fraud department was run by someone who had no computer skills beyond using Excel. I wrote a comprehensive document explaining what happened in the scenario they saw, why it happened, how to prevent it, and admonished them for stonewalling me on something that was so clearly not my fault and not an instance of click fraud.
As a result, they reinstated me and paid my earnings, but I feel terrible for what I'm sure were hundreds of other people who were wrongly terminated and weren't able to get a response from them like I did.
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.
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.
EDIT: see below for correction
This would be separate from anything that class members receive just by being class members.
It is on page #9 of the settlement PDF: http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/docs/settlement.pd...
"1.44. “Settlement Fund” means a cash fund of $11,000,000, to be paid by Google in accordance with the terms of this Settlement Agreement. "
and later on the same page:
"2.1. Settlement Fund. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Google shall establish a Settlement Fund of $11,000,000. Google’s total financial commitment under this Agreement shall be $11,000,000. "
Later there is the order in which this amount will be paid, the actual people which suffered from the thing will be paid last (only after deduction of expenses, services, etc. which it is easy to presume will not be "peanuts").
We'll see how much people that were affected will actually get back.
It looks like I have the same Google account (found the old e-mails for adsense on that domain) even though I have nothing listed under adsense right now.
I no longer run ads on any of my sites and probably never will, but it would be nice to get that fucking $12 for letting Google run all those text ads for those years.
It was a glorified 404 page with a google search widget & adsense ads on it.
$11M payout for possibly thousands of publishers is pennies.
Sure enough, a few weeks later we were perma-banned from adsense. Destroyed all hope for my business. At no point did we get to communicate with a live person. Fortunately I had set up an LLC and used the Federal Tax ID from the company instead of my own SSN or I would have basically been blackballed from internet advertising forever. I disputed it, owning up to what happened and explaining how I couldn't undo it. The robo-response was that my dispute had been rejected, ban was permanent.
I bet this destroyed so many people's hopes and hard work over the years. When you have a million followers, it will take serious fraud to cause a problem. When you are a nobody starting out, figuring things out for the first time, you make one mistake and you are done forever. I realized that if anyone didn't like a less popular uploader they could just make a new account, and click on their ads until they got banned. Pretty horrible.
I haven't been involved with adsense since, but if they don't provide the ability to disown clicks they should add that. There is a lot of testing that goes on when you are building a product.
What sucked about Google Adsense doing this is everyone started using Google, then got big and they killed off smaller web ad networks. Then they ripped the rug from under content creators that chose them where they cut them off.
It was a bad move, I sometimes think it was a big data move only to get people's personal information and get free tracking across the web of user activity.
It was definitely evil and the brick wall they setup for clarification was unnecessary and very cold.
Sure, If you visited specific Warez sites, you could assume that the Ads served will likely infect your machine. And sure, the guys running the websites might not be able to cash out the ad revenue.
But the realization, that a lot of legit businesses today are in the same situation as sites who were run from shady servers in "digital no mans land" by guys concerned that some kind of law enforcement might ask who owns the site is either funny or deeply disturbing.