Screwed by Google Adsense

Have you noticed that all the Google ads are gone?

If you remember correctly, the Food Journal was featured in The New York Times a few weeks ago. This resulted in an amazing 15,000 hits in three days.

You think this would finally generate some income for all the work I put into here.

HA! Fat chance.

I promptly received an email from Google saying they were cancelling my Adsense account for “invalid click activity.”

They were accusing me of fraud. They were accusing me of stealing!!

I don’t take accusations like that lightly.

I wrote back that I had recently gotten a lot of hits from the NYT article and that I had been moving the site to WordPress.

Google reinstated my account. No apology. They started their email with

Google treats instances of invalid click activity very
seriously.

In other words, even though they reinstated my account, they still thought I was a crook. They followed with this act:

Based on the findings of our investigation, we have deducted $8.82 from your account. This amount represents the earnings previously credited to your account from invalid clicks.

So, instead of apologizing, they took money from me. Now, according to them, this money goes back to the advertisers. I myself used their AdWords service to plug ZenKimchi for a while. I stopped it because Google was taking a lot of money from my account, and I wasn’t getting many hits. So how do we know that Google is returning the money to the advertisers and not pocketing it themselves?

We don’t know. I asked Google for more information on how the incident could have occurred, and they replied that the information was “proprietary.” One person did an investigation and found that they hadn’t returned the money to their advertisers.

On a rare political note, this is what will happen when you shrink a transparent democratic government enough to “drown it in a bathtub.” The power vacuum gets filled by corporations like Google who are only answerable to their shareholders. Any challenge to their authority will be met with “that is proprietary information.” We’re already seeing that with the Chuck Hagel (R)-produced Diebold electronic voting machines.

Since Google will not share any more evidence on why they shut down my account and took my money, then I have to conclude that it was because of the spike in hits.

I’m not alone in dealing with Google on this. I was finally making enough money for Google to cut me my first payment check when they did this. They have done this to other people. More examples of how Google, under the dark curtain of proprietary information, prosecutes, judges, and administers punishment to the content providers who provide its income are here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

As of now, I’m looking for different forms of advertising. I always thought Google Ads were ugly, and I was thinking of ditching them anyway. This is the nail in the coffin. If you want to advertise on ZenKimchi, email me, and I would be glad to share my site statistics.

Until then, I’m still considering if I’m overreacting. What do you think? Please give me your opinions and suggestions for alternatives.

Shameful Admission: I’ve recently reinstated a few Google Ads here as an experiment. I am consciously making sure no “invalid clicks” happen. Let’s see what happens.