Comment by yunusabd
6 hours ago
My favorite story:
1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.
2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.
3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
I keep hearing this same story over and over. It's starting to sound like that's just Google's business model.
But in large, it works. We only hear from people for whom it doesn’t work.
1 reply →
Seems about right, in the sense that these advertising companies are just fine dealing with scammers / taking their money … but there are corners of the same company that also have reasons to not allow that behavior and it becomes a circle where Google users and etc are banned for Google encouraged activity.
Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users.
https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h...
Perfectly fine according to google.
Lawsuit time!
I would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.
Are most Americans not able to fight an international tech conglomerate at the drop of a hat?
This is what class actions are literally for. Yes, I know it sucks that the only people who make money are the lawyers, but it can result in some behavioral change.
Google is fine attracting bots when it makes money for itself, but it can clearly detect that bot traffic when it has to pay out. There is likely huge amounts of money in total that Google has collected money from in ad buys but that they could also detect as bots. I would think class action lawyers would be all over this given the total amount of money involved.
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Small claims court!
Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.
Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.