Anecdotal but I administrated a small site a while ago that tried to monetize it's modest traffic with google Adsense. Everything was fine until we tried to "cash out" - google is fine taking your business until then, at which point you have to go through a completely automated "ID verification" process, and if you fail once, it's pretty much GG. We couldn't get "verified," and lost several thousand dollars that was in that account, and abandoned the service shortly thereafter.
If you look at Adsense reviews online there are hundreds if not thousands of similar stories. Straight up theft.
Yup! Google did this to me. I ran a forum and decided to put ads on it, which they were happy to do. When I attempted to cash out they accused me of committing clickfraud and refused to pay out. There was no way to appeal.
This is why, to this day, none of the businesses or startups I've been involved with have used Google products if we can avoid it. At the startup I was a founding engineer for we hosted on AWS despite Google's venture fund being one of our investors. Google's products just can't be trusted.
This happened to me as well, I started a forum in college and put Adsense on it; Google accused my account of click fraud, and froze it, keeping all of the ad money. I tried to find ways to appeal, and they didn't care. They could have at least had a 3-strike rule to give you resources to prevent fraud if it were occurring, and an appeal process. The account is frozen to this day (almost 20 years later), and since Google has a monopoly on ads...it was impossible to put anything else up. There were a few, but they were mostly all scammy. I then had some luck with others, and slowly Google bought them all. Microsoft and Yahoo tried to launch competitors but both failed. Google is an ad monopoly, even Microsoft runs Google ads on MSN.
> When I attempted to cash out they accused me of committing clickfraud and refused to pay out. There was no way to appeal.
I'm guessing that you didn't see a lawsuit or small-claims suit as worthwhile, given the amount of money involved?
If Google is doing this to a large number of relatively small-value accounts, maybe it would be reasonable for a class-action suit. IANAL, but I'm guessing Google would do anything to avoid a discovery process regarding this.
I originally started using ad blockers because of the number of people being accused of clicking their own ads. Idk how they can be sure their systems are working properly when it's basically impossible to appeal and show that it's gone wrong.
That's similar to how insurance companies operate in US. They'd take in customers, let those customers pay for the insurance every month, happily taking their money. But then, if there were any significant claims filed, they'd go combing through a person's medical history, application form mistakes, etc, and find an excuse to kick them out of the plan. "Oh, you didn't disclose that you had strep throat 7 years ago on the form, so we can't pay your $10000 one night hospital stay...". Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.
It's good to know Google is playing by the same rules.
> Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.
Just to clarify what I'm sure rdtsc meant, since that statement can be read two ways.
The ACA codified into law that they cannot do that over a decade ago. He is almost certainly just questioning if they are breaking that law.
Among other things, the ACA no longer lets them charge you different rates if you had strep throat 7 years ago, so the only questions through the marketplace are your county (or zip code?) of residence, your sex, your smoking history and your age.
KYC is required for various terrorism prevention and (moreso) tax reporting reasons, and that's for everywhere, not just Google in the US. What specifically caused it to fail? Using a different name than what was on your identity verification documents? Not being a registered corporation with valid tax withholding information?
You could however be honest and do KYC before onboarding a customer - instead they're happy to let them run ads and end up keeping the money under the excuse of a KYC failure (which they don't have much incentive to rectify).
The parent wasn't objecting to KYC. They were objecting to "once you fail automated ID verification once, you're banned from attempting it again, and Google keeps the several thousand dollars they owe you."
This pattern of facts doesn't look like a terrorism prevention system, it looks like theft, you would have a good case in any court with this pattern of facts.
There was no reason given, no appeal process, can't contact anyone at Google to try to sort it out. Just failed. I understand why it's necessary, but they also have zero incentive for it to be good or even functional.
> Yet, news publishers’ advertising revenue has significantly declined.
Cry me a river.
Our local newspaper (the Oxford Mail) is published by Newsquest, the UK subsidiary of Gannett. It is dreck. Pure unreadable dreck. All the 2008-era clickbait techniques you can think of; churnalism that does little more than repeat press releases; stories taken straight from Facebook "Spotted" groups or Twitter with no added value whatsoever; all surrounded by more animated ads than you thought it was possible to cram onto one single page.
This isn't atypical - pretty much every town in Britain has had its newspaper gobbled up by Gannett or one of two other giants (Reach and National World). Local journalism is basically dead now.
I am absolutely no fan of Google, but Gannett deserves to go out of business and leave the oxygen for genuine local reporting.
The perfect victim is never going to sue Google, because the perfect victim doesn't have the resources to sue Google.
It's just like with Epic Games vs. Apple: a lot of people hate Epic, which is fine and justified, but who else is going to sue Apple? I'm an App Store developer, but I can't afford to sue Apple. Some local newspaper is never going to sue Google (or Gannett for that matter).
> a lot of people hate Epic, which is fine and justified
Do they? genuine question, I'm mostly out of the loop. They seem to have built a genuine economy and ecosystem around their products and people love Fortnite.
This is like how your civil rights are often created, by very flawed victims.
The Miranda rights people claim when accosted by the police in the USA were created by judges during the appeal of Ernesto Miranda's conviction for a smorgasbord of serious offenses. The panel ruled his statements weren't legally taken, and now we can all require the police to make sure we understand our rights before they try to take them from us.
The problem with local news is multifaceted, but three of the major problems are:
- The money moved away from publishers towards ad platforms
- The publishers all got bought by asshole private equity guys who are deliberately crashing the papers as a cash out strategy
- Wider distribution in the absence of strong anti-trust enforcement rewards conglomeration
So, the situation today is that every small local paper, which was a perfectly profitable business in the 80s is now a two page rag owned by a national chain that has planned out how to maximize profit between now and when their last subscriber dies of old age, at which point it will default and screw their creditors.
I tried running ads through google and everything was fine for about a week after I created my account until I decided to update my credit card information for a new card (the old one was expiring soon). Google banned me immediately after I changed the information. Both cards were mine and both from the same bank, same address, etc. Ever since that happened google is asking me to pay ~$8 or so but when I try to pay they are not allowing me to pay because my account is banned. The appeals didn’t work and any attempt of opening a new account fail and I get banned again.
I got so annoyed that I’ve been pretty much declining all google job offers ever since. It got to the point that a google recruiter threatened me that there is a limit on how many times I can decline and I will never be able to get a job at google. Fine by me. Told them to never call me again.
My recommendation is always to avoid google ads if you can
I have asked Google to stop contacting me with potential employment offers for many years now. They are clearly not interested in offering that sort of courtesy to the general public.
As much a really don't like Google, I'm afraid newspapers are losing traffic and thus revenue from their own mistakes. Example here: We're all using HN to learn about this article. If I go to the front page of USA TODAY, I'm show a buntch of useless articles and news that are irrelevant to me. That's the only wining strategty: Google uses algorithms to optimize user experency, legacy newspapers still belive that they are the ones that will dictactate what you'll read or not.
Gannett/USAToday seem to own about every local paper anymore. Their business model is to charge a low price, then jack it up in a year hoping you won't notice. Then not offer refunds and make you call and wait a long time to cancel. My last experience canceling was so bad I'll never sign up with another of their papers.
All of that out of the way, this lawsuit has merit IMO. Google's ad monopoly should be broken up, or at worst better regulated. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, for now, and all that.
Their strategy is to also not have enough reporters to cover local issues. Local newspapers used to put in a lot of effort to find the news. Other than the local high school sports (which they cover more than the small local papers used to )
"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy; no more, no less." ~ Maxim 29.
But I'm content to grab popcorn and watch a dinosaur fight a dragon on this one. Neither company here has clean hands and it's high time someone spent the money to force Congress and the courts to step in and lay some ground rules for the sandbox so all the kiddies can play together nicely.
The reason the newspaper is showing you a bunch of garbage is because Google has basically forced them to. They need the articles on the main page that will push them up in search results.
It's not even what articles they show on the front page, it extends into the content within the article. (Not that USA Today was ever great)
If you go back to the late 90s when the newspapers first went online they weren't putting all the garbage on the front page.
The lawsuit isn't asking a court to destroy Google's algorithms. It's demanding a competitive ad market that isn't monopolized by Google, so that content creators get a larger share of the revenue they are ultimately responsible for.
It's only a monopoly on Google's side because site owners use Adsense, so companies running ads go to Adwords to advertise on these sites. What remains to be seen is if Google is actually pulling any anti-competitive tactics to prevent people from leaving adsense or keep ad companies running on Adwords.
I don't buy that, just like I don't buy ageed with the concerns over AI training on public data. Not that I don't understand why people are mad to see others generating revenue off of what they gave away. And all the more so when their business model gets disrupted, but I think it's misplaced. I still don't think anybody is owed a business model though. They can stop publishing online if they don't belive they can do it properly, as can all "creators".
well Yes and No. Again: Google only serves a lot of ads because has a lot traffic, only has traffic because is better at user experience. Otherwise is a tricky case to win.. It wil be extremely hard to prove on court that newspapers don't have any other ad alternatives other than google, hence the case for anti-trust or similar. It will be an interesting case to watch, more political than technical.
The problem most newspapers face is that they have to compete with the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and none of them can. (And USA TODAY has always been garbage, long before the internet.)
The only categories in which my local paper can compete and win in are local high school sports, local politics and local crime reporting. And that's not much of a business model.
and yes don't get me wrong.. I agree with the general idea behind the lawsuit: Google's is hostile and anti-competitive monopolisitic company. Yet, the initial problem remains, newspapers whant this `ownership` back, but doing so with very biased views, where they will dictate what is `newsworthy` or not
Their claims seem reasonable, but they don't admit that the other problem is their content isn't worth what it used to be or what they think it's worth.
Yeah, I am a long time Google hater but I still think there are a host of other rent seekers. These Newspapers are getting free distribution and can easily use robots.txt if they want to stop Google. Similarly, I can't help but feel like Europe just does some cash grab once a month and hits Google with some fine about data. I think Google is a scumbag company, but on principle it seems like Europe and Newspapers just try and milk this cash cow they are TOTALLY dependent on rather than truly do anything to erode Googles power.
What is the deal with the anti-EU sentiment? Is there something specific you disagree with, or do you simply think laws shouldnt apply to megacorps? The fines google pays for its continued abuse of user data and anti-competitive business practices are a pittance compared to the EUs annual budget (>180bn EUR this year). Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They could always just stop doing the shit (or just pull out of the EU).
"In 2022, Google made upward of $30 billion in revenue from the sale of ad space on publishers’ websites. That was six times the digital advertising revenue of all U.S. news publications, combined. In a functioning market, no one would expect the middleman to make more than the content creator."
Do they think the only "publishers" are "us news publications" or just purposely misleading readers?
Another point not raised here is that Google Search very likely creates incentives or fears to NOT use non-Google advertising solutions because one of the ranking factors that Google uses is "site speed".
Every single news site is the polar opposite of "speed". They are bloated, filthy, infested monstrosities or code and markup and dependencies that take upwards of 10 seconds to actually yield the non-information they brand as "news". So "site speed" is clearly a bullshit metric.
Chrome removes adsense ads very often for slowing down the rest of the page, at least in my experience. I doubt Google has anything in site speed that specifically ignores google's own ads.
It's been a long time now but I was helping a group at a company I worked for optimized page load time. We used some Google tools to give "insights" as to what we should change.
The main change it recommended was to not load any resource like Javascript from Google as it was slowing down the page.
I wonder where site speed is measured from. If Google Ads and the measurements both take place without routing over the internet, they’d have an unbeatable latency advantage.
With a bit of effort, there is a technical solution for it - that is, prerendering the ad and deferring the connection to the ad network until the page has fully loaded.
There's a lot of preamble, but this part is pretty clear:
>The core of the case and our position is that Google abuses its control over the ad server monopoly to make it increasingly difficult for rival exchanges to run competitive auctions. Further, Google’s exchange rigs its own auctions so Google’s advertisers can buy ad space at bargain prices. That means less investment in online content and fewer ad slots for publishers to sell and advertisers to buy. Google always wins because it takes a growing share of that shrinking pie.
I'm unclear on which pie is shrinking. The sources I could find confirm that digital advertising revenues continue to grow and grow [1], while newspaper digital ad revenues have stayed constant (and print advertising has dropped steadily) [2]. Meanwhile digital subscription revenue -- some of which is presumably driven by search discoverability -- is growing nicely, including that of Gannett [3].
So the question seems more about "how much of the growing digital pie should newspapers receive" as opposed to "Google is building its revenues while destroying a market".
Another thing that needs scrutiny: the ability to purchase ads for another company's trademark or trade name.
It's one thing to buy ads for "best refrigerator", but having to pay for "maytag" to rank against your competitors is extortion. I've seen countless examples of funded, well-capitalized companies starving startups for searches to their brand or trade name. It's happening in my space right now, and I'm already anxious of the ad spend I might have to start paying.
It would feel a lot less wrong if Google wasn't the predominant search engine and if they didn't control how people enter URLs or reach websites.
Readit News
If you look at Adsense reviews online there are hundreds if not thousands of similar stories. Straight up theft.
This is why, to this day, none of the businesses or startups I've been involved with have used Google products if we can avoid it. At the startup I was a founding engineer for we hosted on AWS despite Google's venture fund being one of our investors. Google's products just can't be trusted.
I'm guessing that you didn't see a lawsuit or small-claims suit as worthwhile, given the amount of money involved?
If Google is doing this to a large number of relatively small-value accounts, maybe it would be reasonable for a class-action suit. IANAL, but I'm guessing Google would do anything to avoid a discovery process regarding this.
That's similar to how insurance companies operate in US. They'd take in customers, let those customers pay for the insurance every month, happily taking their money. But then, if there were any significant claims filed, they'd go combing through a person's medical history, application form mistakes, etc, and find an excuse to kick them out of the plan. "Oh, you didn't disclose that you had strep throat 7 years ago on the form, so we can't pay your $10000 one night hospital stay...". Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.
It's good to know Google is playing by the same rules.
Just to clarify what I'm sure rdtsc meant, since that statement can be read two ways.
The ACA codified into law that they cannot do that over a decade ago. He is almost certainly just questioning if they are breaking that law.
Among other things, the ACA no longer lets them charge you different rates if you had strep throat 7 years ago, so the only questions through the marketplace are your county (or zip code?) of residence, your sex, your smoking history and your age.
When you buy a Marketplace ACA plan, you are not required to provide a detailed health history.
This pattern of facts doesn't look like a terrorism prevention system, it looks like theft, you would have a good case in any court with this pattern of facts.
Cry me a river.
Our local newspaper (the Oxford Mail) is published by Newsquest, the UK subsidiary of Gannett. It is dreck. Pure unreadable dreck. All the 2008-era clickbait techniques you can think of; churnalism that does little more than repeat press releases; stories taken straight from Facebook "Spotted" groups or Twitter with no added value whatsoever; all surrounded by more animated ads than you thought it was possible to cram onto one single page.
This isn't atypical - pretty much every town in Britain has had its newspaper gobbled up by Gannett or one of two other giants (Reach and National World). Local journalism is basically dead now.
I am absolutely no fan of Google, but Gannett deserves to go out of business and leave the oxygen for genuine local reporting.
It's just like with Epic Games vs. Apple: a lot of people hate Epic, which is fine and justified, but who else is going to sue Apple? I'm an App Store developer, but I can't afford to sue Apple. Some local newspaper is never going to sue Google (or Gannett for that matter).
Do they? genuine question, I'm mostly out of the loop. They seem to have built a genuine economy and ecosystem around their products and people love Fortnite.
The Miranda rights people claim when accosted by the police in the USA were created by judges during the appeal of Ernesto Miranda's conviction for a smorgasbord of serious offenses. The panel ruled his statements weren't legally taken, and now we can all require the police to make sure we understand our rights before they try to take them from us.
Maybe if local newspapers made more money from advertising...
- The money moved away from publishers towards ad platforms
- The publishers all got bought by asshole private equity guys who are deliberately crashing the papers as a cash out strategy
- Wider distribution in the absence of strong anti-trust enforcement rewards conglomeration
So, the situation today is that every small local paper, which was a perfectly profitable business in the 80s is now a two page rag owned by a national chain that has planned out how to maximize profit between now and when their last subscriber dies of old age, at which point it will default and screw their creditors.
I got so annoyed that I’ve been pretty much declining all google job offers ever since. It got to the point that a google recruiter threatened me that there is a limit on how many times I can decline and I will never be able to get a job at google. Fine by me. Told them to never call me again.
My recommendation is always to avoid google ads if you can
All of that out of the way, this lawsuit has merit IMO. Google's ad monopoly should be broken up, or at worst better regulated. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, for now, and all that.
But I'm content to grab popcorn and watch a dinosaur fight a dragon on this one. Neither company here has clean hands and it's high time someone spent the money to force Congress and the courts to step in and lay some ground rules for the sandbox so all the kiddies can play together nicely.
It's not even what articles they show on the front page, it extends into the content within the article. (Not that USA Today was ever great)
If you go back to the late 90s when the newspapers first went online they weren't putting all the garbage on the front page.
I don't buy that, just like I don't buy ageed with the concerns over AI training on public data. Not that I don't understand why people are mad to see others generating revenue off of what they gave away. And all the more so when their business model gets disrupted, but I think it's misplaced. I still don't think anybody is owed a business model though. They can stop publishing online if they don't belive they can do it properly, as can all "creators".
The only categories in which my local paper can compete and win in are local high school sports, local politics and local crime reporting. And that's not much of a business model.
That's literally their job.
Do they think the only "publishers" are "us news publications" or just purposely misleading readers?
The main change it recommended was to not load any resource like Javascript from Google as it was slowing down the page.
>The core of the case and our position is that Google abuses its control over the ad server monopoly to make it increasingly difficult for rival exchanges to run competitive auctions. Further, Google’s exchange rigs its own auctions so Google’s advertisers can buy ad space at bargain prices. That means less investment in online content and fewer ad slots for publishers to sell and advertisers to buy. Google always wins because it takes a growing share of that shrinking pie.
I'm unclear on which pie is shrinking. The sources I could find confirm that digital advertising revenues continue to grow and grow [1], while newspaper digital ad revenues have stayed constant (and print advertising has dropped steadily) [2]. Meanwhile digital subscription revenue -- some of which is presumably driven by search discoverability -- is growing nicely, including that of Gannett [3].
So the question seems more about "how much of the growing digital pie should newspapers receive" as opposed to "Google is building its revenues while destroying a market".
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183816/us-online-adverti... [2] https://www.axios.com/2022/06/21/digital-newspaper-ad-revenu... [3] https://www.subscriptioninsider.com/type-of-subscription-bus... [3] https://www.subscriptioninsider.com/type-of-subscription-bus...
It's one thing to buy ads for "best refrigerator", but having to pay for "maytag" to rank against your competitors is extortion. I've seen countless examples of funded, well-capitalized companies starving startups for searches to their brand or trade name. It's happening in my space right now, and I'm already anxious of the ad spend I might have to start paying.
It would feel a lot less wrong if Google wasn't the predominant search engine and if they didn't control how people enter URLs or reach websites.