ka-yich

Elum

Whisp bundled in a blue sky

Yellow leaves falling diagonally

A bridge over scents of Florence

Program think in seventh silence

Like a Bosnian pressure cooker

Whistling in the Kansas Sun

Now Missouri

Echoes

To be still there lost in air

In the vapor you exhale

Breath far away

Echoing

Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

One year ago my Google Ads account got suspended. I thought it was a mistake at first but six useless appeals later I’m realizing it’s probably not. From what I can tell, my suspension is permanent. I’ve gotten no information back from each appeal rejection except to say that my account “was and is in violation of Google Ads policies”. The only clue is the notification regarding my suspension that’s shown when I’m signed into Google Ads. It says my account “violated the Circumventing systems policy” and links to https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en. As far as I know, I didn’t circumvent any of Google’s policies.
What did I do? I advertised a website (https://www.woltcodes.de) with my Wolt promo code (Wolt is a European food delivery company), which gave me and anyone who used it 6 EUR for each of their first two food deliveries.

It’s beyond me why my particular account was suspended when there are so many other promo and coupon websites advertising on Google. It’s especially baffling since a Google Ads support agent helped me setup my ads, without mention from them that my ads were inappropriate.

The contrast between how their support agent treated me when they wanted me to spend money and how they turned a deaf ear when I was hoping for some sort of recourse couldn’t be more stark.

Over the years, Google has gone from being a search engine to an advertising company where paid results are promoted and Google’s own custom search tools are gradually being introduced, taking away traffic from specialized search websites for hotels, flights, and other lucrative markets.

Google’s near-monopoly in search (close to 90% market share) and dominance in digital ads (close to 30% market share) has given it and its select customers incredible power. These days, anyone with a credit card can create a money making machine out of a niche business idea, provided that it remains profitable after Google has been paid off.

Unless of course, they ban you from their ad platform, remove you from their search results, or decide that your niche business is now mainstream enough for them to compete with you with one of their own custom search tools at the top of their search results.

Insidiously, the bait and switch that Google is slowly pulling off still seems like a net positive to me because Google Ads greatly simplified marketing of goods and services and made advertising widely available to millions of small businesses that otherwise couldn’t reach a sufficiently large audience to take advantage of economies of scale.

How targeted advertising encroaches on people’s privacy is a different problem whose implications we’re collectively still learning to appreciate.

Google is an essential tool for millions of businesses. If you want to market your business, one of your best bets is to advertise on Google. Of course, having this essential role in our society it’s easy to question whether Google really deserves such an outsized cut of the worlds online businesses’ revenues, and such outsized power in deciding who is allowed to participate in the first place. Alphabet’s profit margin is close to 30%. Spending money on a better support experience would undoubtedly cut into that.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I feel this is no way to be treated and the more I wonder how long other people and the world’s governments will put up with paying Google’s pay to play taxes, letting themselves be tracked online, and submitting to Google’s opaque judicial system where sentences are seemingly for life, and appeals virtually useless.

I’m very grateful that some alternatives to Google do exist. Today I’m switching to DuckDuckGo and migrating my Gmail to ProtonMail. At least now I don’t have to worry about getting locked out from my email as well. Unfortunately, I have little hope that the word game which I recently released on Google Play won’t eventually be found in violation of some other Google policy and thus summarily suspended as well.

After a year in development, my friend Jonatan and I are releasing a new game for all the word game lovers out there:

https://ronigame.com

Jupiter

The center of every experience trapped inside itself. Drawing onto itself, until the center of everything is at the center of self. It falls out and comes undone, lays expanding.