Saturday, December 6, 2008

Complaining about not getting free money is marbles

This article was dugg as a top story today, and to me it perfectly captures a certain annoying trait that I come across a lot on the internets. The crux of the author's complaint is that he had his AdSense account suspended because of "invalid clicks" that weren't his own, thereby depriving him of 106 hard-earned dollars.

Since AdSense pays based on clicks, Google gets suspicious if the same IP address clicks an ad too many times, fearing that the site owner is behind it. According to the author's theory, somebody sabotaged him by clicking his ads over and over, causing the big G to suspend his account. Funny stuff. But this guy doesn't see it that way:
Reflecting back on my experience, it’s actually quite sickening, thinking that I gave Google 5 months of FREE advertising on my site, only to get my account deactivated due to someone else who didn’t want me to get paid.
Um, you didn't so much give Google anything as enter an agreement with them whose terms, if you had read them, were written to protect Google. And rightfully so, given that they only, what, solicited the advertisers, negotiated agreements with them, and provided the mechanism to target and deliver the ads, all the while assuming the risk on behalf of those advertisers that this delivery system might be abused. So Google in turn allocated some of that risk to you, and you break into tears when it turns out you can't get free money from your anime site. A real cybertragedy.

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