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AdSense Backlash

I guess it really was too good to be true. The AdSense backlash has begun, with Eric Thauvin’s dismissal from the scheme for “invalid clicks” prompting Russell Beattie to take a good look at the AdSense terms and conditions—which have some pretty nasty twists in them. The plot has thickened today with Google adding a new term prohibiting users from issuing any press release or mak[ing] any public statement about the subject matter of this Agreement. What’s that about?

Google are obviously trying to cover their backs against people who would abuse the system by clicking their own ads (manually or with a script), but seem to be using draconian measures to do so. This raises an interesting question: can a malicious third party deprive their competition of advertising revenue by setting up a script to follow their competitor’s Google ads, thus banning them from the service? I don’t see how Google could detect such shenanigans, especially given the number of advertisers within their system.

Let’s just hope the Google mantra “don’t be evil” wins out in the end. At the moment their AdSense programme is suddenly looking a lot less tempting.

Posted 2nd October 2003 at 6:20 pm

This is AdSense Backlash by Simon Willison, posted on 2nd October 2003.

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6 comments

  1. This raises an interesting question: can a malicious third party deprive their competition of advertising revenue by setting up a script to follow their competitor's Google ads, thus banning them from the service? I don't see how Google could detect such shenanigans, especially given the number of advertisers within their system.

    That's something I've been wondering about ever since I got a warning from AdSense that they'd picked up something fishy. When I sent a message asking for clarifications I was told that their method of detecting these occurences is proprietary so I couldn't be told. Now while I see why (people would just find ways around it), that's a major PITA.

    Lach - 3rd October 2003 05:36 - #

  2. Honestly, this sort of legal stuff is de rigour for the advertising industry (including not being able to say "Google and my site are in partnership" which is what the last phrase is designed to prevent), and frankly I don't really mind (I've written similar contracts too), including them not telling you how they discover "fishy" behavior -- as Lach points out if they told people, people will just work around it, we have to do the same thing on our site and these are just ladies worried about their rank on a recipe site!?! But invalid clicks is not something new, ad companies have dealt with this problem forever, and you can sure as hell figure out where the clicks are coming from, and cheaters or corporate espionage will be found out. What surprises me that not one is talking about is their ad sense bot is completely unrelated to googlebot and not nearly as nice. Every time their ad is requested on a page, the bot requests the page in order to parse the site and provide more targeted ads the next time the page is requested by a user. If you have a database driven site, your bandwidth and server load just doubled (and not for a customer...). And it is not clear how long they keep that page cached... So Googlebot crawls you and then the ad sense bot (Mediapartners), you'd think they'd reuse the data they already have. Oh, and while googlebot is appropriately throttled to not overtake your sie, mediapartners does not seem to be, so your peak traffic time will DOUBLE in traffic because the bot is requesting every page right after a real person does. If you don't do much traffic or only serve static pages, you are fine...but just something to consider about their model if you aren't. I think the real backlash should be over the tech, not the contract.

    Gay Gilmore - 3rd October 2003 20:19 - #

  3. Oh, and while googlebot is appropriately throttled to not overtake your site, mediapartners does not seem to be, so your peak traffic time will DOUBLE in traffic because the bot is requesting every page right after a real person does.

    Please tell me you're joking - that's just insane! I don't have any sites running AdSense so I can't confirm that but if it's true then yes, there should be backlash over the tech.

    Simon Willison - 3rd October 2003 20:55 - #

  4. Just came back to see if anyone else running adsense had commented on this problem or had any luck with them. I'm not joking. How else do you think they are able to do the targetting? Look for "Google Mediapartners" user agent it is completely different than Googlebot. Low traffic sites or cached sites don't have a problem with this, but we sure did. We running the ads only on cached pages now, so it doesn't hurt us, but, oy, they almost brought our site to its knees initially. I tend to think google is smart and they'll improve this problem, but to a company like that bandwidth and computer power are irrelevant...

    Gay Gilmore - 8th October 2003 17:03 - #

  5. http://www.vipcn.com http://www.sron.net http://www.viphot.com

    ewind - 13th March 2005 07:48 - #

  6. http://www.vipcn.com

    soft - 7th April 2005 05:10 - #

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