I put adsense ads on my taipei game about 2 years ago and last week finally hit the payment threshold of £60. I ask them to post it. Next thing I get an email saying ‘account suspended due to illegal activity & you lose all your income’. Just like that, no further explanation. So I appealed & just got the reply today ‘appeal refused’. Again, no further explanation. I’m totally baffled and a bit annoyed. Have I been scammed by Google? :persecutioncomplex:
So beware if you’re considering trying for ad revenue! (alternatively if you hate someone go to their site and click on the ads a lot)
the same happend to me two or three years ago (lossing exactly 100$) I think that I warned about this in a thread somewhere here on JGO but not sure (ps: at this time, I eard others similar stories from other people)
:-\ Pity I missed that topic or I might not have bothered!
Not good is it? You’re found guilty and not even told why. So much for Google’s motto: ‘Don’t be evil’
Damn, that sucks. And of course, any kind of legal options are simply not worth it over £60.
Reminds me of the speeding cameras here in the US - here you go, pay us 40 bucks. If you want to contest it, you can probably get it overturned but it’ll cost you way more in both time and money, have a nice day.
Now do that x 10,000. Every year. Nice little earner there, Google.
Cas 
I took me almost 2 years to reach the $100 threshold for one of my sites. At one point I made it my homepage and clicked an ad whenever I saw it. 
I thought the same way about the way Apple was dealing with payments to app store developers. To make a long story short, there was a $250 minimum before they paid out, but the minimum applied per region - so if you didn’t make above that in Asia or whatnot, you didn’t get to see that money ever, though in theory they owed it to you.
I was shocked when they actually changed their policy and removed the minimum altogether. Made me wonder about the reason they had it set up like that in the first place - perhaps they weren’t just being greedy about it (yeah, right). Now I get my $30 a month from them, which makes me happy? sad? I don’t know.
Then again, in Google’s case, that money is free and clear for them. Though technically, that’s not generating income, but removing an expense
That’s what small claims courts exist for.
[quote]that’s not generating income, but removing an expense
[/quote]
inded, but that’s nearly/exacly the same
I would love to see someone take Google to small claims court over that. Wonder if that’s even possible.
[quote=“avm1979,post:11,topic:36058”]
It has been done but… for £60? I don’t think that would cover the plane ticket.
[quote=“SimonH,post:12,topic:36058”]
Especially since it looks like the guy got screwed in the end. Very disappointing.
Yeah, I just found that too. Apparently he was was actually encouraging people to click the ads.
…but I never encouraged anybody to even visit the game, let alone click the ads! :’(
Maybe you accidentally clicked on one of your own ads?
Google is getting really annoying these days. Unrelated example - I uploaded a gameplay video for Starfarer to youtube a couple of weeks ago. It’s using a public domain rendition of a classical music piece (Wagner, Flight of the Valkryies), so neither the performance nor the piece are copyrighted. YouTube flagged it as “infringing content”, which in their world gives them the right to show ads in the video - how convenient! So far they haven’t, and there’s a dispute resolution process, but I suspect if they decide to actually show ads, there’s not a thing I can do about it. Other than start using some other service.
dont look for the reason he lose, they find one, but they may have found hundreds others, the only reason that Google do not give explanation when closing an account is because they dont have one, they probably decide this with some heurystic algorithms (in the best case… they may also have a real financial goal)
there is ways to fool adsense, the only protection they can get against this is to claim that they have a super-detector that work 100% times while they have in reality nothing.
Google is a real problem because it just dont respect any laws
If you want a reason just tell yourself that they take no risk by disabling your account, that the only real reason
Thing is, they keep making money if the account stays open. I don’t know what the split is between google/site owner, but for sure they’d make more in the long term by not closing the account, right? So just closing accounts randomly doesn’t add up for me - they’re losing money too, especially if they pay back advertisers as they claim to (who knows if they really do).
Can’t argue with that.