Every time I hear a story about an Adsense site being banned for a minor, or obscure reason, which is often fixable (but not with googles unappealable, algorithmic support / dispute process), this is what comes to mind.

Google seems to ban so many sites, yet what seem like obvious frauds make it though. There are forums full of black hat tactics and adfraud services for sale, yet rather than doing a few “buy/busts” to go straight to source of this stuff, they seem to focus on the publishers, and ban them for all manner of reasons often beyond their control.

I mean, I can buy that traffic to any site, I don’t need to own it. And then they bare the punishment.

And we could all just shrug and say “who cares”. But those ads support content on the web (more, it did). If google had more effectively banned the bad players and spam tactics, we wouldn’t have the level of SEO spam, low budget, useless content we see today. We’d still have the independent bloggers, making a decent wage, writing good content. But they can’t compete, because spam is more effective, and if they get banned they can just spin up another 10 sites.

But if you play by the rules, you’re the real loser.

What value does any of this have to anyone at all except him? What an absurdly stupid waste of time. They pay for traffic which in my book makes it illegitimate because it isn't genuinely interested people, and expects it to what, be people paid to click around instead of machines spun up to click around? How is that any less stupid?!

I don't think it's that clear that paid traffic means illegitimate: you can pay for ads on Search and expect it to be human traffic that is interested for example.

As someone that's been watching internet based fraud since 1996, this sounds like it could be been written almost exactly the same in 2002. Everything old is new again.

Nothing much has changed: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/10/24/something-rotten-i...

Are we witnessing the greatest fraud in history?

based on my own experience with Adsense

we probably are

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one other thing people should keep an eye on

Google inserting Adsense tags into organic traffic

people who were coming to your site anyways - Google pretending it's paid Adwords traffic

I'm not sure I understand. Is it -

They create a crappy site with blog spam.

Pay someone else to get people to visit.

Then the people who have been directed to the site by someone else click on their ads, which = $

But they just found out the people who visit are really bots.

But currently everyone is getting paid. So the only loser is the advertisers at this stage.

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> 8M * $0.80 CPM = $6400 revenue

> 8M * $0.25 CPM = $2000 expenses

> Profit = $4400?

> i_am_rich_AF : yes this is per site per month

> the only loser is the advertisers

In the short run yes. In the long run the cost per ad view/click drops and legitimate sites suffer from reduced ad revenue.

In that case everyone wins, because they'll be positively stimulated to not be funded by ads.

You'll only summon more marketers with incantations like that.

I don’t think the genuine content publishers who go out of business win.

That's at least progress--ten years ago, that guy would be posting here, whining about how his great, content-rich site isn't getting the attention it deserves.

depending on the scale, people do get arrested for this sort of thing https://www.google.com/search?q=arrested+for+%22adfraud%22+O...

How can "paid traffic" be legitimate?

Ask google.

wait arb still works?!