I also developed a website young (mid teens), which was essentially a "beautiful/unique website ranking" based on visitor submissions and upvote/downvote system. I had the essential pieces done and launched the website, super excited as my first real project.

I decided to toss on Google AdSense to see if I could potentially monetize the website by putting a single picture advertisement on the right side of the website. I was starting to generate some money (small, but exciting for a young developer). I was talking to my high school friend about what I was doing and how AdSense worked. Unbeknownst to me, he later visited my website and clicked the ads repeatedly expecting to make me hundreds of dollars... well, my account was shut down.

I tried to plead my case, Google didn't care at all. I was "banned" and a small fish. Years later (in my early 20's) I considered revisiting the idea of monetizing a site I had for an online community. I tried to appeal to Google again lifting the ban and was denied.

I was effectively banned for life from using Google AdSense as a young teen because of a friend "trying to make me rich" without him knowing the repercussions. I know there are alternatives to Google AdSense, however, Google was the one that payed the best. Still irks me to this day when I think about it...

How is this system immune to me clicking on an enemy website's ads 100's of times to get them banned from AdWords?

Nothing. If anything, I'm feeling like we should create bots, browser extensions that repeatedly do this and cause massive havoc on their system until they listen and start figuring out better ways to fix their system. Folks are not fighting back. I'm not into ads and have never cared about using them to monetize, but if I did and they took my money. It's war.

Related idea: https://adnauseam.io

That was part of my argument during the appeal. And like every other report of similar things happening, all I get back in response was some canned copy/paste email from their policies. It seemed very out of my control for something like this to happen and I felt wrongly punished - and for a lifetime!? I can understand "banned for X amount of time" but as a young developer's first offence a lifetime ban seems a bit overkill.

Google knew they were friends. Common contacts, location histories, easy.

Wow, I tried to add Google Ads to a web community I hand-built built in 2005 and had this exact same thing happen to me. They have my social security number, so ~15 years later I still can't use their platform. I never even float the idea of using Adsense to a company I'm working for, because in my experience the whole thing is just broken.

I remember being confusingly bitter towards Facebook when it became an ad network, clearly selling user data to generate revenue, but it wasn't until this comment that I realize it's because I tried to do it the other way and got banned.

Honestly my big problems with Google as a user are the same as yours: they try to automate their customer service, and the software just isn't even close to being a human equivalent. It's an absolute nightmare.

I understand trying to automate customer service but when you have an alleged human reply with the following after an email chain with nothing more then RTFM, something is broken. Phrases such as "I made sure to include all the information available to me" just make you feel even more worthless.

> Wed, Aug 28, 9:28 AM EDT: Google Play team > I’m not able to provide any more information or a better answer to your question. In our previous email, I made sure to include all the information available to me.

Update: It looks like they didn't actually include all the information available to them, there's another level of escalation, apparently only accessible after public attention https://twitter.com/GooglePlayDev/status/1166999937156100096

Is there really no other way to monetize except through ads? Sure, there needs to be more regulation in this space, I agree with that. But the idea that ads are the best monetization has never sat well with me.

I understand that it's convenient because you get money without asking your end users for it. But I've always thought of it as "if it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't" and stories like yours just keep reinforcing that feeling.

And all that's without considering how ads degrade the user experience or help erode the privacy. Every time I have to browse the web without an adblocker, I get freshly shocked at how awful it is.

Sure there is, but most people don't bother for a few reasons:

-Slapping some ad network's code into your site is comparatively easy, and monetizing almost every other way is hard (i.e. "I just want to create awesome content and get paid for it, I don't want to be my own sales department, too, that's boring") -Even if you do monetize other ways, slapping some ad network's code into your site is, effectively, 'free money' on top of what the site's users are willing to pony up for -Users have been inured into believing and accepting that covering every possible square inch of civilization with ads is an unavoidable consequence of modern life. So much so that the absence of ads in something that isn't otherwise monetized is suspicious (there's no such thing as a free lunch)

You're forgetting a major one: there's a whole gulf of things that people just aren't willing to actually take their wallet out for. People even scoff paying $8/mo to Netflix while spending hours watching it daily. Good luck taking payments for your little project.

For all sorts of reasons, too: we have been conditioned to think ads = free, none of your competitors ask for money (they use ads, so they're "free"), the modern payment flow is still cumbersome and doesn't support microtransactions, there are all sorts of things like HN that I simply wouldn't use if it wasn't free, your users can't afford it, etc.

One of the worst aspects of ads is how they've mutated our society's relationship with paying for things that we value, but ads definitely fill the void outlined above. Your creation's value to society doesn't have to breach the high threshold of getting a user to take their wallet out.

But just think of all the things you have done on the internet today, all the things you enjoyed doing or thought were worth even a tiny amount of attention, yet how unwilling you'd be to actually send money their way in the current system.

There is probably an even bigger one:

If you take money, you are (in some countries) legally bound to reimburse if shit happens.

And this is something I'd like to see for products that make their money less directly: If it would be legally the same if you paid with personal data, by watching ads or paid with money like any other product Facebook and the likes would be forced to quality management AND stuff like random blocking wouldn't be possible bcs of customer rights.

This sums it up really well. I could get $400/month easily from thousands of users via ads, by just putting a simple piece of JS on the website.

But getting those users to use a debit/credit card or paypal to give me some money, even if it was less than $1 would’ve been very difficult.

As I explained to the parent commenter, on top of that this website became very popular in India, which made that option even more difficult...

I wish there was, and I considered charging users but it becomes a lot more complex at least from a technical point of view.

The other big reason for not trying was that the biggest user base was in India, where my website was fairly popular for a number of years. This meant that most of the users didn’t have as much disposable income as average users in western countries.

Ads are annoying, but they are an incredibly easy and effective way of monetizing a popular website really. If they are placed correctly they shouldn’t even impact the ux that much.

Sponsorships possibly through Patreon? User sponsorships in the $1-5 range get a little "I'm a sponsor" bling, companies (or individuals) can sponsor higher perhaps with levels for on-site only ("listen to my new release!") or off-site ads (software, instruments, mics, etc.)