Google needs more humans in the loop → Re: Unsophisticated exception handling

I don't have a problem with google being an advertising company, and I don't even care if they are no longer even handed when it comes to their own properties, or if they buy companies that, from their position of superior knowledge, they know are under-valued in advance of their competition.

But I do think some of their employees have to be assigned to take calls from their customers, as distasteful and grubby as that seems to them. They are still an organisation of nerds at heart and nerds hate phones, but it is a risky strategy to hide behind algorithms.

They probably do this to a gazillion people, every single day. It would take more reps than any building in India could ever hold.

Although they do, I'm sure that only a very small percentage are accounts over a reasonable revenue size.

Google is large, but cutting off sites with no human check that generate more revenue for them than their expenses to have a full time american engineer? it seems a little odd.

It may generate revenue but not as much revenue from other investments (where that money could otherwise be spent). Alternatively, they stop spending and they still get the revenue. You are not going to drop Ad Sense...you are going to deal with it as best you can. That is incentive for Google to continue flipping you the bot-bird.

it isn't much $ in the scheme of things, especially if they re-instate.

However the lost revenue on their end from even 4 days disabled (because they cream off 50% of the ad receipts) would pay for hours of some high level engineer to double-check the bots. And I'm asking for 3 minutes of human time, not hours.

It doesn't make sense mathematically, unless of course they DO check these compliance decisions and have such draconian rules now that they won't even deal with an adsense publisher site that contains the URL of torrent sites on a secret list, even if it was listed innocently, and even if it doesn't "drive traffic" or whatever their wording is.

However they just won yet another court case where they were sued for indexing and offering defamatory material in auto-complete and search. Their defence was the normal "safe harbor we are not a publisher" argument. Which is great. But not one they apparently believe in when it comes to entities other than themselves?

So which is it.
Either they don't mind bots making mistakes, ones that could be headed off before they cost $s, with the smallest amount of human input. OR, they actually they require all publishers to moderate all content in case something illegal gets by, but take refuge in safe harbor when they index something illegal.

Which is it? Neither is very flattering to google. I'd like to believe the first, that it is just a screwed up adsense program they'll sort out eventually. I guess I'll find out.

My point is...they don't have to help you and you will remain a loyal customer. Meanwhile it wouldn't pay for a call center otherwise they would be doing it. Evidently it is cheaper for them to have false positives than to defend themselves from copyright lawsuits.

I guess until they have meaningful competition they can run things that way, yes.

They will never have meaningful competition so long as their customers tolerate their behavior.

We had the same problem with Google ads ages (maybe 5 years) ago. In our case they couldn't even tell us how we allegedly infringed, just that we were terminated due to violation of the terms and conditions, and that there was no recourse. Gee, thanks.

I love Google's innovation spirit, but ever since then I've learned not to trust them with anything business critical.

I run a pretty large free forum host and Google has been hammering me lately with violations that don't make any sense. It used to be when I received any type of violation, there was an issue ID number and I could issue a personal reply. Not anymore. Granted, they aren't outright disabling the URLs and they're giving me a chance to deal with it, but I haven't always been given that opportunity either.

Now they've built this whole policy violations center. And as of a few days ago, they added a feature to "mark issues as resolved" after you've been given a warning. They've removed personal contact entirely it seems and want to automate this even more than it was before. Very scary times to be an AdSense publisher.

you want to watch out, that's what I thought as well, attend to the warning (even if it makes no sense) and things will be good. For example a month ago I had to remove a post that contained just a list of all the alt. newsgroups that someones ISP had removed. It was posted in 2008.

There was nothing wrong with the post, it was informative, etc, however clearly it is now forbidden to even mention some of the more tasteless alt. groups, and/or the quantity of newsgroup mentions on one page tripped up the AI, so rather than waiting and trying to raise someone at google I just deleted it.

Then a month later they send this other warning simultaneously with disabling ad serving to the entire domain.

I went through the entire membership list here to see if any DSLR members have an @google.com email address, every single email address now bounces.

My old adsense rep from years ago now promotes google+ so I had him in a circle. I shot him a direct google plus message. Maybe that did the trick, maybe not, because he has not as yet replied.