MicrostockGroup

Well I got my adsense banned with them a little while ago because someone started clicking my links. This was a person I know, but not something done at my request or with my knowledge - basically someone who had decided they wanted to "help me out". I had to ask around to see what happened because google don't actually give you any reasons about what's happened. Their response was to close my account and refund the balance to advertisers (about $60 which had been built up over about a year). Their "appeal" mechanism is an automated form that you can fill in, which automatically sends back a response a few days saying your appeal has been denied - again with no other reason or correspondence.

From what I've heard, this experience has also happened to much larger adsense earners.

In microstock terms, its the equivalent of an agency shutting you out, taking all your money and never answering any inquiries as a result of an event that you have no control over. Google may be really good with the PR, and have fuzzy slogans, but from what I've seen now, at the hard edge they're nothing but a ruthless advertising business.

I'm sure they're already working on some way of monetizing Google images. The configuration options they've added (size, color, etc) seem kind of stock-ish.

That's a horrible way to be treated and it does put me off building up adsense as a form of earnings.  Isn't there any way to contact to a person from google about this?  They do so many things well but this is appalling and I have heard about other people having the same problem.

I've has a bee in bonnet about Google ever since I found out they don't pay their artists. They approach illustrators and expect you to do the work just for the honour of working for them. As far as I can tell you don't even get a visible credit.
It all came out when a few of them told Google to get stuffed.
"don't be evil"...yeah right

i hear the person that leaked this info to the media got fired... haha

There's also plenty of cases where competitors deliberately and successfully sabotage a site's adsense by doing basically clicking links. Google's method is to assume guilt without any recourse or reasons. They get away with a lot of things because they're so dominant and because people have no idea what they're upto. For example, how many people know that personal gmail is crawled by bots to make sure advertising is channeled to you accurately? What other use is being made of the content of your email?

People are worried about loosing their privacy on facebook, but in reality google is far more liberal with the amount of personal data it collects than anyone.

The only people who really win from google are those that build automatically generated content syndicated from free (or stolen) sources and optimized for the search. Google isn't the friend of genuine content creators and artists.

I wonder why they can't just use something to make sure multiple clicks from the same IP address don't count?  There must be a better solution than just banning innocent people?  This really puts me off using adsense and I am sure they are losing lots of money with this policy.

I've heard too many stories over the years about Google's approach to business to see them as warm and fuzzy.  Heck, even PayPal has a better reputation for dealing with its customers than Google.  Then again, I did work for Google's CEO back when he was a VP as Sun Microsystems.  Eric Schmidt has all the warmth and humanity of a crash test dummy.