Last month, an anonymous blogger who claimed to be a former employee slammed Google with dubious claims that he had canceled AdSense accounts so it would not have to pay publishers. Despite a strong rejection from Google, that request escalated into a class action lawsuit on behalf of Free Range Content, a California company that claims Google terminated its AdSense account to withhold payments.
The class action lawsuit alleges that Google “improperly refused to make payments to thousands of website owners and operators” and “sought damages for any US Google AdSense publisher whose AdSense account was disabled or terminated and whose last payment was made by the AdSense program has been permanently withheld by Google. ”
But the whole thing smells like fish.
TechCrunch writer Sarah Perez and I concluded that the original blog allegations were rubbish for a number of reasons listed below, and Google gave us this statement in April in which we firmly denied the allegations:
“This description of our process of enforcing our AdSense policies is completely fictional. The color coding and “extreme quality control” programs described by the author do not exist. Our teams and automated systems work around the clock to stop malicious actors and protect our publishers, advertisers and users.
All publishers who sign up for AdSense agree to the terms of use of the service and a number of guidelines designed to ensure the quality of the network for users, advertisers and other publishers. If we discover violations of this policy, we take swift action, which in some cases includes deactivating the publisher’s account and refunding affected advertisers. ”
In our investigation, we found the following. Although they claimed to be a Google employee, they did not use any language that matched Google’s internal lexicon. It has been alleged that AdSense publishers’ competitors used “invalid clicks” to liquidate their accounts for fraud, but Google has sophisticated algorithms in place to detect this type of attack.
Functionally, it is believed that Google will reimburse advertisers if it doesn’t pay their money to a publisher, so it couldn’t make any money from the alleged fraud in the class action lawsuit. And pushing publishers with high lifetime values to Google just to generate a one-month boost in sales is an unsustainable and therefore unwise strategy.
Hagens Berman’s lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeks to prove that Google has violated contracts with users and its implied commitment to good faith and fairness, unjust enrichment and violation of California law unfair competition. ”However, this is not the first flimsy lawsuit filed by Hagens Berman against Google. It filed another class action lawsuit this month alleging that Google was keeping smartphone prices unlawfully high, which was thoroughly and humorously debunked by Android police. And if our suspicions are correct, this new class action lawsuit won’t get very far.
[Image Credit: Tambako/Flickr]
