Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
Google is an overwhelming market leader vertically and horizontally. Not only do they not have to compete with their competition. They don't have to compete for their competition's business partners. They don't have to compete at all.
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
> What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
It's not hero worship to think he knew what a customer was. It's pretty basic, and given he won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, he probably knew more than the basics.
I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.
Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.
When you want to keep your house warm, you ordinarily should not burn the rafters. However, when the house is about to collapse anyway, it is cheaper to dismantle the roof and to burn the rafters than to buy firewood.
Hypothetically you would have already paid for the ads before your account gets suspended/banned then hypothetically Google just keep sending you automated replies denying your requests for support until you give up or lawyer up. And when you consider the shear scale Google's adtech networks run at, this would add up fast and generate revenue over costs. Hypothetically
I really don't get it. Ads are supposed to be Google's biggest revenue thing but the entire process is just so infuriating at times. Their ads dashboard/tool for running ads is one of the worst pieces of software i have used period. My theory is they just dont care about individual experience as long as businesses see value in it. Nobody is going to not run ads because the platform is from hell. They still need to run ads and thus suffering is okay.
I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate.
So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads.
Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else.
ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.
$220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense.
Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?
Would the casinos benefit from a careful presentation of the mathematical odds of all the games and how to best position your wagers ?
Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?
The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
I know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season.
Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.
It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
If you spend that much money on ads you should be a Google Ad partner, and you usually get to have a dedicated, on-call support agent directly from Google.
We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.
Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do?
If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
Agree with this — the economics have completely changed. Along these lines, we all need to re-scope our personal cybersecurity.
For example, developers should no longer run dev environments on the same machine where they access passwords, messages, and emails — no external package installation on that box at all.
SaaS Password Managers — assume your vault will be stolen from whichever provider is hosting it.
Ubikeys will be more important than ever to airgap root auth credentials.
The problem we will encounter with self driving cars is that while they will make less mistakes than humans, they will make different mistakes.
Humans will continue to have a hard time accepting this tradeoff.
I live in LA where Waymos are now on every street. My experience is that they don’t respect human courtesy, so for example if I need to cross a lane of busy traffic, a human may brake as a courtesy to let me through. Waymos have fucked me over where a human probably would have shown some level of community and empathy.
That courtesy is almost always bad practice and is generally unlawful. You must yield right of way to a pedestrian at a legal crossing, but california has codes that prohibit impeding normal traffic flow, including stopping in the street to wave across a pedestrian where there is no such crossing. It's especially dangerous on multi-lane roads because the stopped vehicle can blind the pedestrian to other traffic.
I would dispute saying it is almost always bad practice. Sometimes it is, people do dumb stuff, but in many cases it solves problems before they become a problem to start with because most humans are pretty good at predicting how others around them will react.
Stopping in the middle of the road to save a pedestrian 3 seconds while costing 5 cars on the road to wait 10 seconds is obviously dumb, but what about recognizing the gap near you in the line of cars is the only gap around for the pedestrian waiting ahead, and either slowing down or speeding up a little bit to open that gap wider which makes everybody safer and eliminates any real braking events.
You might not notice all the things people do now to make traffic move smoothly, either intentionally or not, but something as simple as a line of robot cars spreading out on a road can cause problems when traffic levels that normally leave large gaps for easier left turns, pedestrians, poor visibility crossings, etc, instead becomes a steady spaced stream of traffic that has to be disrupted to fit those other options. Very small things can result in large traffic bottlenecks. Humans aren't immune to it, we cause out own problems with things like traffic waves, but we also solve many problems ourselves without really thinking about it.
Sure, there are valid scenarios. LA certainly has some terrible and legal vehicle crossings. (The fast, windy portion of beverly ranks.) I agree that it's hard to navigate without some cooperation. It's just that almost all of the crashes I've witnessed involved someone giving a bad go-ahead.
I wasn’t clear, but yes I meant in a car. During morning commute there are whole hours where certain roads are gridlocked leaving no space to cross. Beverly is one example of this.
There is no way to cross unless someone yields to let you through
I was a taxi driver in LA - I've lived the past 10 years in Portland. One major difference in driving style (at least before a lot of New Yorkers moved to LA) is that in LA, people merged late in a fluid style, and traffic shuffled. In Portland, people line up a mile before the sign for the exit lane, and aggressively don't let anyone in. Which means you have to be extra aggressive to get in if you don't want to wait in a voluntary Soviet line behind a hundred idiots with two brain cells and nowhere to be. Thankfully, Portlanders are all passive-aggressive, and much less likely to get out and attack you than Angelenos.
Personally I always let people in when they need to go. What does that cost me? A second or two? When people actively try to cut you off from merging it leads to more accidents and more road rage. Just merge peacefully and let people merge without getting your ego involved. That's more or less how LA used to be, at least before a million New Yorkers moved there who didn't know how to drive.
A lot of our society works/has less friction because of human courtesy. Systemically stamping it out of every interaction for optimization will not result in a better society.
Our systems don't cover every case, and it's better when we use human courtesy to solve the edge cases.
In many places, traffic would not function if drivers did not e.g. make space for other drivers to change lanes. It's an extraordinary claim to say such behaviour is bad practice (or even illegal??)
In that context, yes, there are certainly cases where making space is reasonable and legal, like stopping shy of side intersection while (traffic is stopped) to allow a turn.
Stopping or altering traffic isn't, though. You shouldn't stop at a green to allow another driver to maneuver for all the same reasons.
I also hate that "courtesy." It blocks traffic behind the yielding car and is often done without considering that driver's surroundings (like impatient drivers switching lanes and speeding up to overtake the yielding car, increasing the chances of a collision with the crossing car).
> The problem we will encounter with self driving cars is that while they will make less mistakes than humans
This is only true for certain self-driving cars. Tesla and Uber are among the worst, and are far worse than human drivers. Something like 10x, I believe, in terms of miles driven?
Maybe there is a new product for a little robot on a leash that you send out into traffic and any autonomous vehicles will stop, and then you can proceed safely.
Waymo's are not about to run a person or bicyclist over. Just walk in front of them and they'll stop for you to cross. You can always start livestreaming if you don't believe it, the insurance payout would be amazing. (Subject to the laws of physics, naturally.)
Source: Haven't been run over yet by one, and I live in one of their current markets.
> Waymo's are not about to run a person or bicyclist over.
This has only introduced more novel problems. People can completely immobilize the vehicles by standing in front of them, or placing a traffic cone. (And while this is kind of funny when done to unused vehicles to bother a multi-trillion dollar corporation. It is not funny when it's done to harass women.)
This in turn spirals into a whole new set of political problems, because drivers are collectively quite intolerant of the pedestrians and especially cyclists they share the road with. There is a lot of pedestrian and cyclist behaviour that is curtailed by motorist bullying, which autonomous cars don't really do. (Your walking in front of them being a fine example)
Things like cyclists "taking the lane" are deeply unpopular despite being entirely legal and good road safety practice. Increased rollout of AVs will only make this more prevalent and then you'll have a whole new demographic of angry people mad that their waymo is slow because it's behind a cyclist.
I understand your sarcasm, but do understand that drivers legitimately have a lot of political weight.
"Increase the speed limits" is a classic populist policy that keeps being reimplemented (and walked back for it's impracticality) all across the world. Policies to ban cyclists are uncommon, but certainly not unheard of. One imagines the self-driving car companies won't be too bothered to fight against laws that hurt everyone but them.
>People can completely immobilize the vehicles by standing in front of them
This is true of any vehicle lmao. Someone can stand in front of your vehicle and prevent you from proceeding and there's not a thing you can do about it.
With an angry human behind the wheel you can't be assured they won't hit you on purpose or even accidentally clip you swerving around you. With a robot car designed to maximize safety, you don't really have to worry. Even if they started making robot taxis drive like assholes, the maximum payout for suing a robo taxi company for getting hit is WAY higher than some rando on the road. The guy you pissed off and ran you over for standing in the road might have just got out from a 15 year prison sentence, hates the world, and have a net worth of -$70,000, and isn't going to earn you anything besides a life long injury.
I certainly wouldn't. I'm a short gay guy, plus even if I was big I don't want an assault charge; standing in front of my car doesn't give me a legal right to assault someone. From a legal standpoint (in most places) it's a deadlock.
Not every guy is big and strong and capable of or wanting to do violence.
You wouldn't, but they key is that the cyclist/pedestrian doesn't know it's you.
Say it's 5% of drivers who are maniacs, one encounters many many cars, and the cost of misjudging this situation is "grievous injury". So the end result is people will give way to cars even when they don't have to.
> Not every guy is big and strong and capable of or wanting to do violence.
This is structurally comparable to the way women treat "all men" as "potentially violent". It's not about you per-se, just a consequence of the group you cannot be immediately separated from.
Speaking of, that's the other half. Sure you're a normal guy. You don't want an assault change. The tradeoff changes when you are at risk, when violence is being done to you. (Hence the harassment-of-women example)
Sure you're not gonna try to murder the person outside like the road-raging maniacs, but when your safety is on the line, driving dangerously close past them is on the table.
With the harassment of women example are you trying to say that women are more at risk of receiving violence? Because boy do I have a (not so) surprising statistic for you.
Yeah, the last thing american roads need is vigilante "justice". Like drivers, not all that you see are bad. Although it is very easy to spot and fixate on the bad ones.
Do you want them to put googley eyes on it? If you can see it, it can see you. Pretty simple.
Eye contact matters for humans because they might be looking at their phones, or their McDonald's fries, or staring straight into the sun. None of these things happen with self-driving cars. It's a non-issue.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1]
Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area.
The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But
there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.
Well, where are your facts? Did you contact them to find out what they can and cannot do?
The conspiracy theories often imagine cloud seeding as some weather control superweapon that can create catastrophic floods or droughts. In reality, you're just giving water droplets or ice crystals something to condense around (usually silver iodide particles). You're working with what nature has already provided and you can't conjure storms from nothing or dramatically amplify them.
But hey, maybe it's better limit your knowledge about a subject to just its name. It enables you to be afraid of things you don't understand. Some people crave that feeling.
There is tons of public information online about it. This is a strange approach to claim that the only way to know about a topic is to become an investigative journalist making phone calls to research groups.
Most of the usable water supply annually in CA comes from the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
This is also where the largest cloud seeding operations are.
People who claim cloud seeding ops only make a small impact on the usable water supply don’t understand that a small percentage shift in snowpack makes a difference between a drought and not a drought.
What I’m saying is that estimations of total cloud seeding water impact do align with the numbers needed to take the state out of a drought.
As I linked elsewhere there have been lawsuits in the past over cloud seeding causing floods.
Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.
Yes — similarly I work in cryptocurrency and constantly try to tell people that credit cards are unbeatable for payments because of the consumer protections. Chargebacks are an insanely consumer friendly feature. Nobody ever wants to engage in that conversation.
Agencies use a lot of contractors. This sounds like a part time contractor kind of gig not full time based on the details.
Not that this makes everything OK, but that would explain the weeks of silence followed by termination over whatsapp. It’s possible there were no further formal requirements to sever the relationship besides ceasing communication.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
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