According to their terms, Google can cancel any account at any time without having to offer an explanation. They also have a history of not replying to publisher problems at all. The whole 'Official' Adsense forum is run by volunteers and it's near impossible to speak to a real person.
Even if they are hacked and thousands of accounts are cancelled I don't think Google will respond.
I would so, so love to see a big player start a modern Adsense alternative.
This is all true and everyone has been crying for alternatives for > 10 years but nothing at all has appeared. The rest is just worse as far as I know (I got out of that stuff 5 years ago). Would love to hear there is something else, but uncooperative, trigger happy (fraud; people clicked your ads, account closed, no further communication) Google. For a new company, after some research into alternatives, I would probably still use them... Have to...
The only one who could run an AdSense alternative is Facebook. I'd love to see them going that way but I seriously doubt they'd bother. There's too much friction to support such a platform and with ad blockers gaining traction it might become unsustainable pretty soon.
Is that actual mandate from FB leadership? Between the Like buttons that track visit habits (used actively in non-FB marketing since 2014[1]), native FB visits + tracking on that, mobile tracking[2], and volunteered information, Facebook + their share widgets probably has information parity with Google + the Google Analytics aggregate information + Gmail (which has the added
"benefit" of only needing one party to profile multiple people - i.e., John uses gmail and CC's 15 non-gmail users about $foo provides Gmail with a certain amount of information). The Forbes article is a really good analysis (albeit from 2014) as to the specifics of their privacy policy (which, as I understand it, doesn't give out PII, but certainly has the potential to craft an 'anonymized' profile on a user). Car insurance companies, mortgage companies, health insurance companies (fans of McDonalds!), etc could do wonders with that data[3] compared to how crude their existing metrics are.
[3] Mortgage lending has certain 'fair lending' and anti-discriminatory practices to counteract things like reverse redlining[4] after the whole racial discriminatory scandal thing, but exploiting the law is easier than exploiting the instruction pointer on a Linux 2.2 box haha.
Not strictly true. There are a number of ad network competitors with similar data on users that we've never heard of. Conversant is one of the largest, with sizable inventory on the web and in apps.
Appnexus is a RTB platform and a DSP (and a whole lot of other things they do). OpenX is/was an exchange and is generally the #1 place for buying/selling dodgy af traffic.
Neither does what Adsense does per se. What Adsense does is it reads the content of the page, and loads relevant ads from from its database of ads (things people put in adwords) and from GDN (also things people put in AdWords, and DBM, only they're pictures). The GDN bit has always been a bit icky IMO.
So, no, they aren't alternatives. Chiticka and others WERE alternatives, but there was a quality control issue (also supply side issues, because Google is a HUGE brand) which led to their eventual demise and/or pivots to waaaay dodgier practices like popunders.
Since you seem to know the industry well, what are the top resources (of any kind) to study the current state of online advertising for an advanced audience? Both from the technical side, and from the advertiser's business side. At a level that you would ideally know and learn if you were working as an executive in the industry.
I actually wrote a 10 page article on this for an internal audience. If people are interested I could clean it up and post it somewhere. Otherwise, the knowledge is scattered over blogs, ad exchanger, etc.
I'm interested. Please let me know if you publish it. Trying to get a better understanding about the industry, but the information is hard to find or scattered all over the Web.
Because a lot of the value is not just from the page (and note that taking a page plus pictures plus site, NLP on that, etc is not an easy thing to do) but also from your navigation around the internet and previous google searches. Putting that all together is hard and requires approaching Google scale.
Well, the hard part is dealing with fraud, not letting fraud compromise your payouts, and giving value to both the publishers and advertisers in the meantime.
Even if they are hacked and thousands of accounts are cancelled I don't think Google will respond.
I would so, so love to see a big player start a modern Adsense alternative.