[Guest0918231]

They really don't seem to care. I run a site with AdSense. Google makes about 20k a year in commission from my site. I get zero support.

1. My ad clicks went from a steady 500 a day to 1-5 a day and my revenues plummeted. I contacted Google. After one month of of being passed around they tell me they're not allowed to disclose what's wrong, but I can try labeling my ads as "Advertisements" on my site. One month of waiting for that response.

2. Recently Google started clawing back 50% of my monthly earnings at the end of the month. It's typically 0-10%. However, it just jumped to 50% the last couple of months. So they give me daily reports that I'm earning $150 per day, and then at the end of the month they just say nope, we're actually going to only give you half of that revenue. Oh, and we can't tell you why, that's confidential. I searched online and found lots of people recently reporting 30-80% of their revenues are being taken away. No one can get a reply from Google. What's even worse, I use header bidding. So someone opens my site, Google says they'll pay X to show an advertisement to that user, they outbid my other networks, and then a month later they say they can't actually pay that price. Meanwhile, my other ad networks could have shown an ad, but Google outbid them with a price they're not willing to pay.

3. I tried to setup an in house advertisement the other day using Google DoubleClick. The idea is that I create an ad for my Patreon page, and if none of the ad networks I run can pay more than X for that impression, then it shows my Patreon advertisement. Well, Google says Patreon is malvertising, and they won't let me run a display advertisement on my own site, linking to my own Patreon page. What does that notification say in the ad manager? It says they can't disclose any additional information and not to contact them.

This company is a joke. They've collected at least 100k in commission from me, and I get zero support. I'd like to fix that issue resulting in half of my revenue being taken away each month. Nope, no one I can talk with, and if I do talk with anyone, they can't disclose that information or what ad unit is the source of the issue. I need to try making a change, and then cross my fingers that one month later I don't lose most of my revenue. It would probably take a year to understand the issue with monthly experiments. Anyway, I'm in the process of removing Google from my life now. I have zero respect for that company.

[300bps]

A lot of people have Google horror stories like this.

I’ve had a gmail account since early beta. I upgraded to their $10 per month for 1 tb storage (which they recently increased to 2 tb). I recently got a better deal from Microsoft so want to switch. So over a week ago I deleted my entire Google Drive. Except it put everything into the Google Drive “trash” that still counts against me. I immediately emptied the trash except that literally did nothing that I could tell.

Then, about 100 GB per day has been freeing up from the trash for the last week and a half. I can’t cancel the extra storage until this is complete or I’ll stop receiving email on my gmail account. At the snail’s pace that it’s freeing up storage on my Google Drive from the trash they’ll be charging me another month. It’s ridiculous. And as a paying customer there’s no practical way to contact them.

[magicalist]

> And as a paying customer there’s no practical way to contact them.

Support is one of the things you get if you pay for storage, though?

[300bps]

Support is one of the things you get if you pay for storage, though?

Yes, and it's completely useless. Their user interface is such an anti-pattern that it has to be by design. All I want to do is delete everything in Google Drive and delete everything in Google Photos. For Google Photos, the fastest way to do this is to zoom out ridiculously, hold the shift key down, click the first photo to delete, then the last photo you can see on the screen and then release the shift key, click delete and repeat like 200 times for the number of photos I had on there. Oh and don't scroll out TOO much or your browser will just crash. Seriously, this is their answer to deleting photos.

And Google Drive is no better. 1.2 TB of files from my drive and cleared out the trash at least 75 times but a week and a half later I still have over 100 GB in phantom files. And suddenly all these additional images showed up when I click on Storage in drive.google.com and you guessed it - I have to delete them one page at a time. It's like they're doing anything to make sure you can't get your account under 15 GB so you can stop paying them money. And their support just gives generic advice like what I've typed here.

I've switched entirely to the new Microsoft Edge for browsing, OneDrive for storage and the only thing I have left is an ancient gmail account that I'll likely be switching over to Fastmail.

[tornato7]

One time I had a friend send me a few thousand photos on Google Drive. I tried to download those. Oh boy. Do too many at a time and it'll crash, otherwise it's select a few dozen, wait 5min for Google to zip them, then download and repeat.

I finally solved my problem by interfacing directly with their API and writing a Python script to recursively download larger folders. It's sad that I was forced to do that, but it worked.

[FerretFred]

> It says they can't disclose any additional information and not to contact them.

I think this is the most troubling aspect of Google (free) services. This is why I bit the bullet a couple of years ago and started running my own mail server. The buck stops here :)