[sharkweek]

Two notes:

First: This was bound to happen eventually - Google can't keep hiding behind the "we don't want to explain it to you because then others would exploit it" excuse for not reasoning out why they have cancelled an account. They just need better immediate fraud detection baked in (unfortunately a lot of unmitigated and spammy adsense accounts can be very lucrative in the short term).

Second: Good god it will be interesting to see who comes forth in this lawsuit. I have a few Adsense sites so I keep my ear to the ground in the forums. The people that whine about being shut down are most commonly 1) running some blatantly spammy sites or 2) won't show their site (so my assumption immediately jumps to them being spammy or doing something to game clicks (menu manipulation, adsense links that look like navigation, popups over ads, etc). Sure, there are exceptions, and I expect that will be the main plaintiff here, but it'll be interesting to see if any of the spam folks try to sneak in there.

[ChuckMcM]

I think this is an understatement, if it gets certified it should be fascinating :-). When Blekko crawls the web when we find hundreds or thousands of different web sites using the same AdSense ID its a pretty good sign that the content will not be useful.

[whoismua]

Chuck, the problem--and IMO it's legit--is that Google allows you sign up, you earn some money and then for no explained reason you lose all of it as they close they your account. Now Google could screen all sites first (not likely) or pay the money earned till banning day. Sure it's written on the TOS, but doesn't seem fair and maybe it's illegal.

[ChuckMcM]

Oh I totally agree, there is an onus on them to be more transparent about what they are doing. The scale is what I find amazing. I don't doubt that clever spammers will sign up a couple of million AdSense accounts over a weekend, and try to pull some click fraud pennies out of them. It is just too tempting a target for "free" money. If you recall there was an event where Google would deposit a small amount of money in an account, and you had to verify the amount to "prove" you owned the account, and some smart chap started creating thousands of bank accounts and accounts and when the pennies got deposited withdrawing them and closing the accounts. I believe it was Brad Templeton who said "Give me a way to steal a penny over the Internet and I'll show you how to make money fast."

That is the challenge I see Google facing, on the one hand AdSense is a thing, on the other its prone to fraud.

[whoismua]

The scale is what I find amazing....That is the challenge I see Google facing, on the one hand AdSense is a thing, on the other its prone to fraud.

I don't really feel sorry for Google at all. They are making $10 to $12 BILLION a year in profit, even after paying amazing salaries, benefits and spending money on a lot of unrelated stuff. So they can hire, 100, 100 or 10,000 new employees to screen better and to reduce false positives. Google is used to profiting from the web while having no responsibility (at least the new Google,) but now no one is buying their shtick. Soon or later the algo changes that shift traffic from other sites to Google and from small sites to larger sites (likely advertisers) will be scrutinized as well.