from Hacker News

Google bans yet another small business

by Bright_Machine on 7/12/21, 5:37 PM with 30 comments

  • by jazzyjackson on 7/12/21, 6:46 PM

    > We need ads. Otherwise, nobody will ever know anything about us. This is how the internet works: you either work for years to get a little organic traffic or you just pay to those giants so they share it with you.

    I don’t like the ad model of the internet (adbusters subscriber here) but this has me very sympathetic. Where do you go to get attention? Google and Facebook have made sure all eyes are on them, so if you want eyeballs, you must pay.

  • by asdfasgasdgasdg on 7/12/21, 6:39 PM

    Google and Microsoft banned this small business. Are we meant to believe they are coordinating to step on the little guy? Despite the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that do advertise successfully on these search engines? Somehow this does not seem likely to me. I suspect there is some other relevant factor that you are not telling us.

  • by m-p-3 on 7/12/21, 6:34 PM

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27812821 posted 4 minutes before this submission

  • by smoldesu on 7/12/21, 6:54 PM

    Sounds like this is an asked-and-answered situation. Larger companies have lawyers on retainer who will look over each ad before it hits the market and determine whether it's deceptive or in-line with the TOS. Google disallows you from mentioning cryptocurrency outright (except in very specific, express situations). Furthermore, the "get out of debt" line would have definitely set off a red flag in my mind, and if I was in charge of ad verification I'd probably reject yours too.

    That being said, Google and Microsoft (or any of the FAANG squad, for that matter) are certainly not your friends in this situation. But are they culpable? I doubt it. This boils down to a human reading your ad and disliking the tone/contents wholesale. It ultimately doesn't matter how your project is licensed, how transparent your company is or who you're working for: the goal of ad-checkers are to mitigate the risk associated with advertising such a diverse range of products. Since you posted an ad for a relatively high-risk product (handles money, integrates with crypto, is a subscription service), it makes perfect sense to me that you got denied access.

  • by macintux on 7/12/21, 6:48 PM

  • by chmike on 7/12/21, 7:12 PM

    Why isn't it possible to make a new ad if the first one was rejected ? I don't fully understand how it played out.

    A service about money like this one is a very sensitive business. I'm not sure it's the encryption or privacy the problem. Google has to protect it's ad readers and when in doubt, they probably prefer to avoid it.

    As this business is probably starting, it has quasi zero credibility in term of honesty. Other marketing strategies should be used to bootstrap it and grow it's user base. Once it will have a few years without any problem and happy users, it would be more trustable.

  • by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 7/12/21, 6:52 PM

    My guess is that their AI model thinks any ad that starts with “[modifier] money” is a scam.

  • by z3t4 on 7/12/21, 6:53 PM

    Just crate a new account from a new computer and new ip. Read guides (using tor browser on a separate computer) about how to beat the system. Thats how you win against the big guys.