Ok. Why does Google even have to ban the publishers? Why not just charge penalties, or temporary suspend them? The only reasonable thing I can think of is... the market is oversaturated, too much supply of publishers, which in effect dilutes the clicks price. Thoughts?
Temporary suspend them? I think they are clear that once you violate the TOS, you are no longer welcome. If people knew they would only be temporarily banned it would make the fraud even worse.
Why give a cheater or better terms, a thief, a 2nd chance to do the same thing? Those who dont cheat and get banned its all down to Google protecting their business from fraud, they cant risk trusting someone.
Google isn't a religion or a charity...It isn't about forgiveness but about running a business. If someone is supposed to sell you a domain name but instead steals your money. Do you then agree to another sale because you are a forgiving person? I hope not because they just learned you are soft and are going to scam you again.
If only a suspension then it would leave to higher levels of clickfraud throughout the adsense programme. Google protecting their business by banning innocent people - they should go the full distance and ban those people from using any of google's services or seeing any of their adverts... any innocent person banned from adsense is being labelled a fraudster and as such Google should protect their business fully by refusing to do business with fraudsters or providing a service to fraudsters... But that wouldn't make business sense... Google are happy to provide services to fraudsters as long as Google makes money - but refuse to allow the fraudsters to make money. I used the term fraudsters as that is effectively what google label people who they ban from adsense, in most cases it would be true, although there are innocent people who get caught up in the process.
This isn't about giving innocent people a second chance though, its about giving everyone a second,third,fourth,fifth...... chance. Surely you can differentiate between doing a better job of reinstating publishers mistakenly banned (which they actually do quite often) and opening up the floodgates by banning no one?
I still believe that they have the upper hand because there are plenty of publishers... If that hasn't been the case they would've given second chances simply because it makes business sense. I am not banned yet, but I am just paranoid... After reading all these posts... I just pretend that I've already lost that battle. I am all for frauds being investigated, but not giving you any proofs? That's outrageous...
They have the upper hand because they runa program that 1.) Allows people with little or no coding knowledge to make money 2.) Pay the best money (Just ask anyone using Clicksor or something similar) 3.) Don't charge anything up front to habve the ability to make money with little work for existing sites People get banned from Clicksor all the time but you don't see any threads about them usually. Why? Cuz they can't hold a candle to Google.
google is a BUSINESS. if a person scams you on the internet, by stealing your money, will you buy from his product again? i dont think so...
I think people are forgetting something. People are spending more in order to get clients, busy up there websites and so on. Its not a click festival, it is expected to deliver value. Google will continue to weed out rogue publishers. Its a business, its not meant to let webmasters get money for cheating the system with friends, auto surf schemes, myspace bulletins and whatever. Now I know people claim they have been unfairly treated by Google, however I personally know only 1 person who got banned, honestly he deserved it. I know people will protest at the assertion that most banned accounts were probably rightly banned, but theres two sides to each story. The business is evolving and I think we will see improved fraud detection actually leading to bigger payouts in the future. Our traffic is worth more than we currently are getting because of the cheating.
In that scenario they would be encouraging people to click on thier own ads or their freinds to no end as there is no violation. It would give a free liscence to click groups where some of the links would count but if anyone wasn't careful the worst that would happen was an "invalid click", not a ban.
Let them click their own ads, as long as they aren't making money from it. And yes people are always caught in these "click groups" so all those clicks wouldn't count either.
No, actually in your system they wouldn't...That is the way it currently works that if Google notices suspicious patterns, all funds are refunded. I highly doubt in a massive click group they can distinguish every single click (Hypothetical the first click would always be paid) and instead by banning those accounts they take past behaviour into account.
They could make it so publishers lose a certain amount (a month's earnings for example) if they notice suspicious patterns. But all that aside, why can't Google give us warnings? just wham! you're banned for life...if they could do anything to improve the adsense experience, it should be that.
If publishers take the time to the actually read the adsense TOS, they wouldn't need a "warning". I'm still amazed at the questions some people post on this forum. Publishers should not lose anything for "suspicious patterns" as long as they had nothing to do with it. If a publisher is involved, they should lose their accout. Getting paid for clicks that are not genuine is nothing short of stealing money from an advertiser. A financial penalty for getting caught would only encourage some publishers to try and see what they can get away with. I know that some publishers would like a feature where google would automatically ignore accidental clicks by a publishers on their own ads. In theory I have no problem with such a feature, but what if the "cookie" was deleted by accident? What if the IP address changed? What if another computer was used? It would likely create even more problems as you would now have publishers saying they had turned this feature on - didn't mean to delete their cookies, forgot they were using another computer, etc. In reality, adsense isn't banning people for a single accidental click - and if it happens, you should promptly send adsense an email telling them about it.
TOS is meant to be read .. Concerning banning innocent people , i think Google will be able to fix this in 1 year time