Google just shut down our $1M business

That a single company, in an unrelated market (ads), merely refusing to do business with you, can almost bankrupt you, means it's time for trust-busting. No single company should have such power.

I'm sure many people lose their jobs when an advertiser is banned for some dumb and false reason.

I'm sure some people fall into depression and commit suicide when their life's work is destroyed.

Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases? Especially when it seems like an honest mistake with no bad intention?

PS: The most aggravating part is that this doesn't even prevent bad actors from using various techniques (identity theft or mass-spawning lots of companies in some lax foreign jurisdiction) to continue operating. This just screws over normal people who fall into some kafkaesque trap based on some rule they didn't know about.

Interesting

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193857

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912

Also, lead generation can help with this problem. I don't know what you sell, but let's imagine it is eco phone cases. So, you register a domain name bestecophonecases.com with a new company(no law prevents you from that) and open a Google Ads account from another company, phone number and website. From accounting point of view, this company is 0 profit advertisement agency. With lead generation templates and webflow, Tilda and other cms it all can be done within a day. Saying from my personal experience, after I purchased a 20 years old domain name that was banned in Google Ads 10 years ago which they refuse to unban.

Look, they have an app that makes money. They care only about the app.

The only proper response is to take what you’ve learned and make your own app, an app that plays within their undefined rules. Oh, and makes money.

They don’t care. You’re an error, an exception, and a money pit. Better to cut ties than to deal with you. If the product is spoiled, throw it away.

These worries don't matter as much if you're large enough to have a human sales rep, but as a smaller company, a false positive algorithmic suspension can shut down your business.

I have zero sympathy for Google when it comes to their monopoly potentially (hopefully) being challenged both by competitors and lawmakers.

i did some google advertising, and tried to do more, but got banned -- one of my sites/accounts -- for illegal category or something -- i was trying to launch a tech support business -- which i guess had been banned because of the indian tech support scams (sorry, my indian peeps).

i was thinking about doing about a grand over the first month -- then see what i had -- i thought it was weird, first of all, because... why let a tech support business sign up to advertise if... you don't allow it?

but then, you do allow it.

until you don't any longer.

and in the banning and unbanning, i would get calls from google account managers wanting to help me set up my account(s), and they didn't know which ones were suspended and why, and couldn't do anything about it/them, and couldn't tell me anything about it/them.

none of it _really_ suprised me, but also, all of it did.

i kind of thought, oh, i'm gonna just turn on some ads and see if anyone starts clicking - i'll literally know in about 5 minutes if my business is gonna fly - this is gonna be awesome.

but it was a few weeks of back and forth and emails and support centers and phone calls and frustrations and business changes and on and on and on.

and the infamous -- what do you call them -- google UIs -- the banality of evil of google's UIs -- that's how i'd characterize them. you interact with them, you do things, you submit things, and they just stare at you and occasionally blink. no change of state. nada. pretty hardcore.

the frustrating part was - i didn't know all that. if i had a friend who knew what this kafkaesque (i don't know what this means, but people say it a lot and i think it means 'bad') world could be like if you didn't know how to navigate it properly, then i would have had very different expectations, so probably a very different overall experience.

my timeline started telescoping outwards -- from an expectation of ads running within 5 minutes, to and hour, to 2 or 3 hours, to a business day, to a business week, to two weeks, to a month plus, to alternatives like fakebook and all the rest.

my realistic expectations now, were i to attempt again to advertise, or to help anyone else do some google ads (god help them), it'd be like....

  this might not work. we can try it, because all the other options are probably trash too, but if you're a professional -- i.e. you're a six figure-type person, and maybe even if not, just pay someone something to help you do it, because otherwise we might get turned into an insects and just lose the emotional energy to properly complete our task.