[varispeed]

I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my posts after I stopped buying ads. I had tens of thousands of followers but content they shared would never reach their friends after I was no longer a paying customer. Pretty shady stuff). I decided to not contact neither Google nor Facebook about this, because I was worried they will ban me and I needed access to GMail and Facebook (to talk with family). I really hope these companies get properly investigated, because they have unregulated power of altering the markets to their favour. This power should only be reserved to governments and if Google or Facebook are so big, they need to be divided and their business space heavily regulated.

[slashdev]

My parents have a business selling low-carb cookbooks online. They used to do very well because of the organic reach they had on Facebook (they have 1 million likes on their page). Posts would routinely have reach in the millions. One day Facebook changed their algorithm and their reach (and revenue) dropped over 10x. They've been limping along since then, and are planning to retire. It's tough having a single point of failure like that.

[tracker1]

Facebook's moderation rules have determined that Keto and Low Carb aren't scientifically supported, so now tend to suppress resources that proliferate those views.

I emphatically don't agree with this, but this seems to be the line of reasoning with a lot of things. The reality that much of science is never truly "settled" doesn't really matter.

On the one hand, I feel there are a lot of leeches to society that hop on trends to pull money from unsuspecting victims and under-delivering. On the other, I am very much opposed to corporations that half the population uses daily acting as broad censors of information.

[TheKarateKid]

What also probably happened is that Facebook changed their algorithm to reduce organic growth to push businesses like this to spend more on ad money. They've been doing this for a few years now, and have been aggressively doing the same on Instagram.

Love or hate TikTok, the reason it's become so big is that their algorithm actually promotes organic growth instead of hindering it.

[tracker1]

That is also entirely possible... I have seen some specific statements regarding my assertion. It's entirely possible to be either, both or a mix.

In any case, I'm using FB and Twitter far less these days than even a couple years ago. I happen to like debate, and discussion of competing ideas. Now it's all ad hominem attacks and vitriol. While I do sometimes engage, I simply don't enjoy it and don't fit well into the echo chambers.

[eloff]

Maybe because all the reasonable people like yourself have left, and took nuance with them. Now it's just the shouty people that remain.

[dan15]

AFAIK the FB algorithm also prefers posts from friends over posts from business pages, since that's the content that people prefer seeing.

[eloff]

That's my parent's theory.

[eloff]

Wow I never thought of that possibility.

I can't stand the censoring by tech giants. It's applied unequally, there is no recourse, and it merely serves to enforce the orthodoxy and drive dissent underground. Honestly it's like the church in the middle ages. What a dystopian moment we're living through when monopoly corporations wield that power in society.

Facebook specifically can go to hell. They're making money by selling people's precious time to advertisers at pennies on the dollar. Jewel thieves pawning stolen goods at 10% of their value is less wasteful to society as a whole. I know they don't force anyone to use their services, but neither do the tobacco companies. They just get people addicted to their product. Just because it's legal doesn't make it ethical.

[londons_explore]

I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more.

If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.

[tifadg1]

So you're saying he was smart enough to grow this revenue to 2000/month, but, in the meantime forgetting something that basic - and the system caught up with him? If so where was the system before?

[londons_explore]

There have been big swings in advertiser behaviour in the last few years. One big advertiser changes their policy to "no longer include sites about LGBT issues", and suddenly a blog about that could see revenue drop 90%.

[hedora]

In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space.

Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT.

It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society.

Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.

[vkou]

> In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space.

Prior to ad networks that automatically match advertisers to display space, yes.

The thing is, though, prior to ad networks, there were a lot fewer advertisers who were interested in spending time and money on doing this song and dance with a slew of tiny web properties. Most of them wouldn't even bother.

You can have no ad networks, or you can have a long tail of low-prominence websites earn ad revenue. Pick one.

[hedora]

Before ad networks, we had a longer tail of low prominence newspapers and magazines than we do now.

[tripzilch]

Can we have no ad networks please?

[gitweb]

Should it also be a requirement for the government to posts what preferences you look for in a partner on dating websites, what gender you prefer when searching for doctors, what race you prefer when looking for cleaning or child care assistance?

[eropple]

This is a ghastly and inhumane comparison.

Companies aren't people.

[tehwebguy]

No, he was smart enough to do whatever he did but lucky enough to get that payout. Over time, someone will always optimize for SEO, AdSense & shareability better.

Perhaps their entire strategy was accidentally optimizing for a keyword that was highly valuable for a short while, who knows?

For a short while YouTubers would mention getting a mortgage in the middle of their video just to improve the rate by tricking the algorithm into showing expensive mortgage related ads.

[ikiris]

You're assuming that it was Google's system that changed, and not their primary ad buyers.

[Guest19023892]

I've had similar issues with AdSense. Running a site for 10 years, and it was earning $250/day for years, then suddenly it dropped. For a while I had the same traffic and instead of 500 clicks a day Google would say I had 3 or 4 clicks. I contacted them, waited a month, and they said to label them "Advertisements" so users are not confused.

Well, my site is mostly text based and I have at least 50px of space around any advertisement, so they stick out like a sore thumb and are not confusing. Eventually the daily clicks returned, but then in the last year Google started taking back 80% of my revenue at the end of the month saying it's "Invalid Traffic". This is after years of it being around 5%. I've made no changes to the site, all the traffic is organic from Google search or direct visitors. I've never once in my life paid for traffic.

I contacted Google again, but they refused to give any information because they can't share specifics for security reasons. So, I'm left losing 80% of my revenue this year and instead of making about 50k after my bills, I'll break even or make a loss.

Since then I tried switching to another company that's an AdSense partner. Of course they take a commission, but apparently they can actually show me the daily earnings with "Invalid Traffic" removed, and not give me a monthly heart attack and remove all my revenue as a surprise at once.

So, I can see how little I'm making on a daily basis now, but I'm no closer to resolving the issue because Google refuses to give any answers, so I'm completely on my own and taking shots in the dark.

The other week I tried building a database of 800 million IP addresses using lists of all IP addresses from datacenters, VPNs, proxies, TOR exit nodes, and IPs flagged as abusive. This obviously took some time to setup and I stopped showing ads to these IPs because maybe they're bad sources of traffic? That didn't seem to help.

Then I tried setting up some Javascript to not load ads until the mouse moved or a user scrolled. Maybe that would help to prevent any traffic where a user is not at the computer? Nope, didn't work.

So, I'm out of ideas. Yes, I have ads.txt configured. Yes, I have a consent manager configured.

> Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more.

What you said sounds simple. However, like I said, Google can randomly drop my clicks from a consistent 500 a day to 3 and give no answers. Or, they can tell me I'm earning $250/day and then when it comes time to pay a month later, they say they can only pay $50/day and the traffic didn't meet their standards. That's a big problem when they just spent the entire month outbidding all my other advertisers.

Lastly, the site I run is filled with great people. It's a community based website with tens of millions of comments. Users on average spend 10 minutes per session, the bounce rate is incredibly low, the average user loads 30 pages a day. People like it, it's full of quality content and posts, and users are writing new comments every few seconds.

[londons_explore]

> The other week I tried building a database of 800 million IP addresses using lists of all IP addresses from datacenters, VPNs, proxies, TOR exit nodes, and IPs flagged as abusive.

This isn't going to work well... Both Google and many advertisers will send bots to your site to scan the content. If they see javascript shenanigans going on affecting ad presentation, they'll do something between not advertising (reducing revenue) or permabanning you...

"Invalid Traffic" is nearly always some dirty business going on - either by you, or by one of your users, or a competitor, or even someone totally random hoping to blend their fraud in with some legit sites like yours.

If I were you, I'd hunt your logs for botlike behaviour and close any associated user accounts.

[dhimes]

But maybe you don't have to be logged in to see ads? If so, then maybe changing that feature could help. Or at least show a majority to only logged-in folks.

[dhimes]

but then in the last year Google started taking back 80% of my revenue at the end of the month saying it's "Invalid Traffic"

I wonder if they returned the money to the advertisers.

[varispeed]

Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system? Capping could have been done by a service created by a team you wouldn't have access to and without knowledge something like that even exist (and rightfully so, as it would take one whistleblower to harm the business). So I am not surprised you would write that there was no such facility.

[londons_explore]

> Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system?

Near enough, yes. Sure, there are millions of lines of code, and I did not read every one, but I debugged enough issues that I'm sure I would have come across this capping effect if it existed and affected more than some dormant/test accounts.

[varispeed]

It's possible to implement something like this and you wouldn't be able to find out, as a service sitting between the network and ad servers, it could even be embedded in an innocent looking load balancer. Why would you think something like that wouldn't exist?

[nucleardog]

Why would Google, internally, implement a feature as if they were maliciously attacking their own systems?

[varispeed]

They could use that to suppress funding to websites that are not in line with Google world views and boost funding to websites aligning with their views. They could also use this to help website competitors who pay for ad words. My traffic also got down once I stopped paying for ad words, but the increase of traffic I was getting from ads, was nowhere near the size of the drop after I stopped using it. Then they capped the ad sense.

[brokenmachine]

So they can not pay the content providers and pocket the advertising money?

Not saying that's what happened but there's definitely motive.

[kylebenzle]

But people will always prefer to blame others and when you can blame a corporation for your problems its always an easier target.

[etripe]

While there is truth in your statement, can you be sure it applies to the GP's story?

[boringg]

I get the sense that this was related to the content of OP's blog. The fact that he was concerned that he would get blocked from gmail and facebook sounds like a level of paranoia, from my perspective, related to the content of the site that's why they didn't push farther. I do see how if you were naturally a paranoid individually you might be concerned about losing those connections, though seems high unlikely they would cut access unless you were putting up shady content.

[vorpalhex]

That seems like a bad faith assumption without more evidence. If your gmail is your main way of interacting with the web then any user is going to be a bit paranoid about protecting it even when doing nothing bad or wrong.

Likewise just having content Google deems unacceptable doesn't mean you aren't owed an explanation of the policy. "Hey, sorry, we've decided that blogs on breast feeding violate our policies on content and we won't be allowing you to run ads" is certainly better than silence.

[boringg]

Maybe it is a bad faith assumption on my part and I don't disagree with you that silence on the end of Google isn't right and I am in no way a large tech company booster.

That said, my point is that there is likely something specific to the OP blog that is the reason for Google turning off the ad dollars rather than the counter argument: some arbitrary nefarious business decision by a large corporation to the shut down the owner's blog revenue source to the point that OP is concerned that they will be removed from the platform as a result.

I get the sense that the content is missing part to the story.