There's an easy reason why I doubt the validity of this. Because you said so. On top of that there's more then enough evidence around showing that this might not be the case that you suspect, but other causes. Without anything of substance besides that, it's untrustworthy to take it on face value. The entire premise falls flat, because you don't know and making an assumption as to what happened. edit: You may want to read this while you're at it.Moonchild wrote:You can believe me or not believe me. That's up to you.
Let's just say I don't understand why you even doubt the validity of this; what reason would I have to "make this up"? If your answer is "to win the argument" then I ask that you not think me so petty as to do something like that.
People who have been on this forum longer will probably recall why Google took action against us (trying to enforce censorship -- it's all in the open on this very forum, do a search). We've also never used "ad-farms" and only used Google directly. After the account was flagged, all websites under that account saw a sharp decline in revenue paid, with large percentages attributed to "invalid traffic", even on sites that did not have "offensive" content; only because they were operated under the same account.
After that, it even branched out to start.me, saying we couldn't have a Google search box there, clearly finding any and all excuse to further reduce revenue.
Communication from Google has been minimal because they clearly didn't want to give me anything to work with to escalate/combat the issue, and anything, and I quote, that "artificially inflates ad performance or harms advertiser conversions" is in violation of their policies and will result in flagging of your account. This extension does both: it inflates ad performance (artificial clicks) AND harms conversions (the result is not displayed to the user but discarded, so conversion will be 0% for any "click"). It doesn't take a large percentage of visitors with AdNauseum to raise a flag in their algorithms, especially considering most people visiting websites with ads don't click on them religiously.
I remember that, I posted here then. Look for a dead account with 700-1500 posts that 5-6 years old, that warned that google would start going down the path that it is now -- and people said things like "oh it's impossible, they wouldn't do that.". Using google directly, as in adsense your traffic is being fed by blogfarms. That's the more likely cause of you being hit, there's a very well known problem with blogfarms driving up the value of ads. Hell you can go order one to do it for you, few years ago it used run $500-700 for 250k, it's far less today, far, far less today. Part of the reason that you don't seem to understand why people have a desire to do this is to hurt google, because google itself has moved from "don't be evil" to "fuck you, this is our time now and you're gonna pay."
Really though, the fact that you have problems with "poisoning the well" in this case, but openly supporting of "poisoning the well" in other cases just reeks of hypocrisy on it's own. That in itself is more likely to piss off the tech oriented people who use this browser anyway.