June 16 kicks off of the 72nd annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, better known to the digital advertising world as a celebration of rosé, yachts, and deal-making. My nostalgic dinner in London with some old ad tech friends inspired me to tell the story of one of my first encounters with the Platformocracy.
Nice Ad Network You’ve Got There, Pity About The Crime
AdSense used to be one of Google’s flagship products. Launched in 2003, it let millions of small Web publishers worldwide sign up online to run ads sold by Google on their web sites, and keep most of the revenue. For years starting in the mid-2000s, Google ran cheerful PR about nice hard-working people who started a web site about their favorite hobby, and made so much money from AdSense that they could quit their day job and live the dream.
Then came fraud.
Bad guys figured out pretty quickly how to exploit AdSense to get money out of Google with fake clicks on ads, fake traffic to real web sites, and even entirely fake web sites. Google started a quality team to fight this so-called “ad spam,” but even with their best efforts, the fraud got so bad that Google was sued by advertisers, and settled in 2006 for $90 million.
From that point on, the top priority of Google’s ad safety team was “protect the advertisers,” aka “keep the amount of ad spam low enough that we don’t have to write another big settlement check.”
If you were a small publisher relying on AdSense, this sucked.
A Day in the Life, AdSense Edition
Welcome to another lovely day in the Platformocracy, circa 2009. Please check your email to see if you’ve been warned about vague policy violations that you had better fix, but quick. Or worse, that your AdSense account has been suspended or even terminated entirely.
You can contact Google for more information about what you did wrong and how to fix it, but don't expect a fast response. They’re really busy being super-scalable.*
If you eventually hear back, odds are that you’ll just get some vague directional comments that mention invalid traffic. If you are terminated and file an appeal, there’s little or no back-and-forth to explain yourself, so most of the time the original decision will stand without any detailed justification.
Even if you don’t get hit with enforcement yourself, for years the AdSense community forums have been full of publishers complaining about being terminated despite being totally innocent. They bet their lives on AdSense, and now they can’t make rent.
You bring this up publicly at a Google partner event. The product manager on stage (a sincere bald guy named Jonathan) makes sympathetic noises and promises to help, but it takes three more years before things get slightly better.
The lesson is clear: you can’t count on Google. You’d better find other sources of revenue, just in case. You hear that Amazon’s got a pretty good affiliate program…
If We Told You Your Crime, You Might Do More Criming
…and that’s how Google alienated its first generation of creators. How did Google botch AdSense publisher trust so badly? One of the hallmarks of the Platformocracy: Secrecy.
Here’s what a NYU professor learned when he was given unique access to Google’s teams and internal documents at the time of the fraud lawsuit.
One of the complaints about Google’s investigation system that I keep hearing is that Google is quite secretive and does not provide meaningful explanations of the inspection results neither to the advertisers nor to the publishers. After examining how their inspection systems work, I can understand this secrecy. If Google provides such explanations, then the unethical users can gain additional insights into how Google invalid click detection methods work and would be able to “game” their detection methods much better, thus creating a possibility of massive click fraud. To avoid these problems, Google prefers to be secretive rather than to risk compromising their detection systems and the advertiser base.
[Disclosure: I took one of Professor Tuzhilin’s classes in business school, and did a couple of guest lectures for him years later, but I never knew about this report, which he wrote after I graduated from Stern and before I joined Google with the DoubleClick acquisition.]
Choosing secrecy over trust poisoned AdSense’s publisher relationships. Google effectively treated every AdSense web site, even ones in good standing, as if they might actually be a covertly metastasizing spam monster straight out of John Carpenter’s The Thing. If the spam algorithm caught your site in its dragnet, you were presumed guilty unless you could prove your innocence.
This made Google look like the bad guy in four common situations:
False positives. Some spam-terminated publishers were innocent, but couldn’t prove it because they couldn’t see the evidence against them.
Victims. Publishers would be terminated even if the policy violation was made without their knowledge by a vendor the publisher had hired in good faith to grow their traffic or improve their ad performance.
The misguided. Clever or desperate publishers could easily stumble into something spammy by accident without realizing it, because Google was so vague for so long about what constituted invalid activity.
Liars. Actual bad publishers would exploit Google’s silence by loudly proclaiming their innocence, making it look like even valid enforcement actions were mistakes.
AdSense Stumbled So YouTube Could Harlem Shake
Google was slow to address these concerns because company leadership thought web sites were an inexhaustible resource. I was told a (possibly apocryphal) story: Google co-founder Larry Page said helping publisher partners was not important, because if any given web site went down, there’d always be another one coming along to replace it. And in any case, the quality team was considered a success because spam numbers were low and advertisers weren’t suing. (See Goodhart’s Law.)
Neal Mohan led Google’s display business (but not the quality team) when this was happening, and I think he learned from the AdSense experience, because YouTube has done a much better job of supporting creators. Neal went to YouTube in 2015, and in 2019 YouTube introduced a relatively transparent, multi-layered enforcement system with warnings that can be expunged with policy training, and a three-strike system with clear and escalating consequences.
But the damage to AdSense, and Google’s reputation as a trustworthy publisher partner, was done. AdSense survived and is still a large business, but it was never the same economic and PR engine again.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].
