[zx2391]

I have not implied that Google tried to be evil. It was just a very interesting observation (which I unfortunately did not experiment around longer, by removing ads again, etc.).

Risk is too high for such things to be decided, but maybe someone buried a change in the second decimal place in an to "ad-fraud" prevention subsystem, which required a minimum amount of traffic or some other non-voluntary things like that.

Even more: impenetrable deep learning models trained to maximize ad revenue - imagine pagerank and availability of ads on the site are two of the N features, what would the optimizer suggest you do?