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by ChuckMcM 4406 days ago
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.
1 comments
whoismua 4406 days ago
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.
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ChuckMcM 4406 days ago
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.

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whoismua 4405 days ago
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.

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