Nov 292022
 
 November 29, 2022  Posted by at 1:37 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,


Vincent van Gogh Autumn landscape 1885

 

 

I’m not sure if what I’m going to tell you would officially be called a shadow ban, but it sure feels like it. A few years ago, we noticed that our ad revenues, then from Google, which had been falling for a while, had plummeted by some 80% from high to lowest. On top of that, at some point Google started sending Policy Violation mails. Which say “you violated our policies”, without ever specifying in what way(s). Now, you could read through all these policies, and guess at what you have done “wrong” and delete the “offending” material, you could delete the entire post, or you can just ignore these mails.

Given that we have no intention of having someone else decide what we write, ignoring them seems the only option. If they decide what we can say, we might as well not say it. What’s the use? If the web is to have any function at all, it will always be to provide diverse opinions. In that, we very much agree with Elon Musk. But yes, through the interference of companies like Google we have moved in the opposite direction. First with Trump, than with Covid, and now with Ukraine. Media and politics are hellbent on wiping out any views and ideas that don’t conform to theirs, but there is no future in that.

 

With the declining revenues, and the violation mails, we decided to look beyond Google for ad providers. Google had a total monopoly in the field before, but there appeared to be other, smaller companies popping up that offered some competition. The 80% revenue drop at first looked to us like Google was simply taking a bigger part of what came in, and that is certainly part of what happened, but there was also something else. That we initially didn’t recognize. Now we do.

We did a number of trial runs with alternative ad providers, which typically started at a promising level, and then all fell down to “Google levels”. These trial runs take months, you have to give the new provider time to get their end right etc. I think we tried 4-5 of them, over a 2-3 year period. Once they’re down to 20% of the initial highs of years ago, you think: this doesn’t improve the situation. And you wonder why, is it their effort, is it their models, it’s hard to see at times. And then the last company we tried sort of opened our eyes.

We had spent quite a bit of time setting things up with them, video calls, mails etc. We in this is me and invaluable friend Danny, who keeps an eye on the back end of TAE. We have good visitor and page view numbers, and one stat that I like a lot, and that should appeal to advertisers a lot. The bounce rate when people log in is close to 30%, which seems normal. But even with that, the average time spent on the site is almost 5 minutes. An advertisers’ dream, or so you would think. But then, just as we were ready to launch with them a few weeks ago, they blew it off.

They said: it’s no use doing this, our biggest advertisers don’t want to work with you. Not good news, but enlightening. This has undoubtedly been a factor in all the trial runs we did, all the way back to and including Google, but nobody ever told us. And why did they not want to work with us? Not because they did their own research, they have other things to worry about. There’s only one source I can imagine them basing this on, and that takes us back to Google. Who have built up a file, a database, of websites they issue Policy Violation mails to.

“Don’t trust those guys, they don’t toe the line. They offer alternative views on Covid and Ukraine”. The end result is that for now we don’t have any ads. I went back to our Google AdSense page, thinking maybe we could go back to their generic ads for a bit, and there are two warnings there now.

• Ads are disabled on one or more of your sites – no ads are serving on one or more of your sites because of policy violations. Please investigate the reasons for this in the Policy Center.

• Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.

Yes, it sounds exactly like what Musk found at Twitter. Just on a much smaller scale. Twitter banned lots of doctors that didn’t parrot Fauci and Pfizer, tried to ruin their careers and reputations. And now we have plastic blood clots, heart attacks and dying and disabled children. Twitter also won’t allow anything but NATO narratives about Ukraine. And now we have one country in the dark, and a whole continent about to experience something similar, while being forced to pay for the pleasure. No amount of Policy Violation warnings can turn that around. But Google’s “policies” are the same as “the old” Twitter’s.

We cannot think for ourselves. Someone else, organized in groups, wants to do our thinking for us. And tells themselves they have the right to do so. Nay, the obligation, lest we stray from their path. Not only do we find that path uninteresting, it would also mean the Automatic Earth can stop publishing. We don’t intend to do that. But at the same time we realize what we’re up against. We are lucky to have people donating on Paypal and Patreon, but losing $400-$1,000 per month from ads of course still hurts. Who knows anymore what an uninterrupted ad revenue stream would look like by now?

Just thought I’d let you know.

 

 

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

 

 

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Home Forums Shadow Ban 2.0

Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)
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  • #122194

    Vincent van Gogh Autumn landscape 1885     I’m not sure if what I’m going to tell you would officially be called a shadow ban, but it sure f
    [See the full post at: Shadow Ban 2.0]

    #122201
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    Thank you for letting us know.

    #122202
    John Day
    Participant

    Thanks Ilargi,
    Technocracy at work. https://off-guardian.org/2022/11/25/china-the-worlds-first-technate-part-1/
    I remain demonitized.
    The economy remains completely monitized.
    This is not even the Great-Leap-Forward yet, where 40 million died, largely of starvation.
    We are part of a significantly large resistance, and we have remained persistent.

    Wait, I’ve gotta’ take this call from the FBI!
    (dark humor)

    #122216
    Dr D Rich
    Participant

    Maybe the causal factor is linked to the true identity of some commenters.
    I first arrived here just in time for World War 3’s inception, The Overnight Repo Operations that started in Sept 2019.
    I noticed and wrote about the demonetization and disappearance of other blogs/bloggers in late summer 2017 (Oh Tarzie and Lenin’s Tomb
    come to mind) coincidental with my employer’s destruction of my reputation by a group of nurses I still haven’t met or conversed.

    I volunteer to disappear.
    ©️👌

    #122218
    Dr D Rich
    Participant

    Ideas of reference

    #122231
    Bishko
    Participant

    My house has no heat. Though I live in California, it still gets cold and I sit here at my desk with a coat on. However, the need to keep Raul solvent has convinced me to send him $100. I know he hates to ask for currency, but we all need to look inside ourselves and ask how much he has altered our lives by being the Man he is and ask ourselves “could we do a little more to assist his efforts?”

    I believe that we are seeing a race between the Technocracy being developed around us and Resource Depletion. With all this raging around us in the Fourth turning we need to keep grounded. I believe that The Automatic Earth has been, and will hopefully continue to be one of the uncorrupted voices of reason in a darkening world.

    Plus or minus a few years:
    1st Turning:1950’s and 60’s Safety and Security was expressly desired and available.
    2nd Turning:1970’s and 80’s Safety and Security was not expressly desired but was available.
    3rd Turning:1990,s and 00,s Safety and Security was not expressly desired and was not available.
    4th Turning:2010,s and 20,s Safety and Security is expressly desired but not available.

    I’m hoping to be able to hang on long enough to get back to the 1st Turning.

    #122232

    No, it’s not about commenters

    #122233

    Raul,
    Convinced of the value your blog delivers. However, given the PayPal controversy recently I have left that service. Have you any other avenue to transfer support funds from Canada?

    #122235

    Raul,
    Convinced of the value your blog delivers. However, given the PayPal controversy recently I have left that service. Have you any other avenue to transfer support funds from Canada?

    For now, Patreon.

    #122238
    Grik
    Participant

    Just mailed my long overdue check!
    TAE and its commenters are my favorite source for making sense of world events.
    Thank you all.

    Thank you also for having a non-PayPal option to donate.
    I recently cancelled my PayPal and Venmo accounts due to their evil “misinformation” policy.

    #122244
    oxymoron
    Participant

    I’ve found the same with my music. It’s everywhere now. The internet to the normies is truly an echo chamber. Rumble Odyssey etc had no business plan 10 years ago. It’s taken this complete censorship nightmare for the underground to emerge but it leaves people in financial stress.

    #122249
    Redneck
    Participant

    The really disturbing part of this cooperation between business and global government is that not only the people in business are committed to censorship but the people in general also support it.
    Censorship and demonitisation needs to be looked at from the big picture point of view.

    Just last week there was a state election in Victoria here in Australia.
    Victoria was the place where the worst of the abuses of civilian rights took place during the scamdemic.
    The premier became a dictator and did untold harm to the people , both to their health and their finances.
    This week it was announced that Dirty Dan as the resisters call him was re-elected with a healthy majority thus illustrating that the people of that state support his dictatorial ways.
    All of the resisters I know believed that Dan would lose the election big time. WRONG!
    The other side of the coin is that the opposition were also Covid control freaks so there was and is no meaningful alternatives to vote for.
    I visited the capital Melbourne a couple of months back and I saw support everywhere and little resistance.

    Notice that support for the scamdemic was and still is global. It was the first global test to see if people were ready and willing to give up their rights, it worked.
    Censorship en masse really started there with Covid and people did and do still support it.
    The G20 including the beloved Russia voted for it to be continued in various ways. Support for the global health initiatives is support for censorship I believe. There is no resistance from the G20 or the BRICS that I know of.

    Once the majority of the public has rejected freedom of speech and movement and control of one’s body there is very little chance of any reversion back to the “old’ freedoms that used to be accepted as normal.
    Fascism is the new normal and is going to increase as time goes by.
    As I have said before , “what are you going to do about it “?
    It seems to me that the most resistance is with the Boomers , I don’t know for sure but I would guess that many here at TAE are boomers.
    The difference between us and the younger generations is quite stark.
    We when we were young took to the streets to protest the Vietnam war.
    Today small groups of youth protest climate change but other than that the appetite for demonstrating publicly is pretty much non-existent.
    The young will have to stand up and make the changes , youth are responsible for shaping the future.
    Iranian youth are showing the way right now.
    Maybe if they were about to be drafted to war they would find their voice .
    The difference between us is how we were educated .
    Education now is force fed indoctrination . That will continue and increase and support for the reduction of our basic rights will also increase.
    People who are resisting hope that financial collapse will bring about a pushback but the sheeple people don’t even understand what they have lost already let alone want to revert back .
    Any crisis of any kind will be used to increase control , not diminish it.
    The general public is in support of the neo-fascism, that is the bottom line , people’s employment depends on them accepting it and so Google and all the media are also supported in their censorship , the people want censorship.
    Although the war in Ukraine is supposedly about Putin and co, starting their own hegemony with different , more fair ideology , the support for Covid which is support for censorship is there in all the BRICS , China of course is in another league altogether.
    That is why I can’t help but smile when people think that the new world order will be different.
    The big C in BRICS is China .
    Putin wanted to be the main player in the old order but the West rebuffed him.
    He was totally with the scamdemic, the basic globalism is still there under the guise of nationalism.
    If Putin cannot take control of the old order he will start a new one where he has control.
    If Putin had rejected the scamdemic he would have credibility as a new fresh breeze of change but all the WEF globalist attributes are still there.
    Musk should continue to broaden his free speech work and launch his new phones and a new Google to boot.
    At least then the dissenters would have their own free speech network and access to advertisers who will support them , unfortunately the majority of advertisers support the status quo and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
    Sorry about the general dis-jointed writing and grammar, the old synapses are not what they used to be.

    #122256
    Curlene48
    Participant

    “Just mailed my long overdue check!
    TAE and its commenters are my favorite source for making sense of world events.
    Thank you all.
    Thank you also for having a non-PayPal option to donate.
    I recently cancelled my PayPal and Venmo accounts due to their evil “misinformation” policy.”

    Hi Raul, regarding Grik’s statement (above). Last year we mailed a large check to the address in Brooklyn that is listed somewhere on the site as a possibility for donating to you. Unfortunately it appears the check got lost and it was never cashed. We finally erased it from our records as it seems it will never get to you. Now my husband is just doing the other option, which take $$$ from our credit card account every month. Although we don’t have a PayPal account, it uses PayPal to process the transaction. That seems to be the best option for now. I hope you can stay afloat!
    By the way, there have been several references to Elon Musk and his new, anti-censorship policies on the blog recently and among the commenters. People may not be aware that Musk just deplatformed Garland Nixon, another voice that doesn’t go along with all the main-stream narratives regarding Covid, the Ukraine, etc. Nixon had tried to post a snarky comment that was partly tongue-in-cheek, but because it wasn’t sufficiently pro-Zelensky, etc., it was banned from Twitter (under Musk). In fact, Nixon has been permanently banned.
    So Musk is not going to be the savior of free speech after all.
    Just my two cents.

    #122257
    aspnaz
    Participant

    Redneck said

    Musk should continue to broaden his free speech work and launch his new phones and a new Google to boot.

    I fear that any new phone manufactured by a Musk company will suffer app starvation: companies like WhatsApp, Line, Shazam, banking apps etc will not build a compatible version that will run on the Musk phone. Musk will then need to enable users to run pirated/unofficial copies of the app or something similar. For example, I can run WhatsApp on my linux Phinephone using a framework that makes it possible to install android apps on the phone without getting the apps from any app store, I load them as a single file which I can get from various places.

    #122258
    Dr D Rich
    Participant

    “No, it’s not about commenters”

    Of course you’re right.
    Managing such a publicly accessible presence insures awareness of hate groups like Canary Mission and the Pink Flamingo fringe of usNNC. I digress.

    Again, places like Jesus’s General, The Rancid Honeytrap and Lenin’s Tomb take ‘edginess’ and provocative honesty to levels not approached by TAE. Yet, for one if not all the aforementioned blogs, recurring/automated Patreon payments didn’t change the outcome either.

    And it’s not like PFF(ofus)NNC and Canary overtly declare their arrival or departure.

    #122263
    willem
    Participant

    @Redneck: Everything you say is true (and sad). Instead of commanding everyone to obey up front, it works best to get as much voluntary participation as possible. Then when you have enough of the public sucked in, you can put the hammer down on the rest much more easily.

    With something like CDBC, they will start by offering people some kind of financial bonus or incentive to adopt it voluntarily. Then when enough people have adopted it for the “free money”, they will try to make cash quietly disappear. I think with the policing of speech, perhaps we are seeing something similar–a certain number of people will go along because what is being suppressed is something they WANT suppressed. It won’t be until the suppression mechanisms are fully in place and free speech has been almost exterminated that the hammer will come down on the holdouts, followed by the imposition of things most people won’t like. By then, most of the people who “adopted” this new “regime” voluntarily will probably never realize that their early compliance is what made it all possible.

    #122264
    Afewknowthetruth
    Participant

    If I were not carrying debt and if I were not scrambling to acquire essential resources and I I did not have substantial expenses and if I were not dependent on a small allowance with is being devalued every week by the fascists of Orcland and Wellington, I would offer financial support.

    As it is, with those circumstances, I do what I can by spending time providing critical analysis and by spreading the word verbally. i.e. “Go to TAE, it’s all there.”

    On the matter of blogs, I used to comment on The Daily Blog, which purports to be a promoter of socialism and environmentalism and free speech.

    However. TDB has strict censorship rules that mean any significant deviation from the accepted line in a comment causes that comment to not make it past the censors.

    I go there occasionally to keep track of what garbage Martyn Bradbury is feeding to the gullible, non-thinking masses who still believe he is authentic.

    This is the kind of completely Orwellian garbage TDB publishes:

    ‘The battle for Bhakmut is led by Wagner Group mercenaries, fighting for the Russian government. This battle is unique because it includes the use of Russian criminals released from prison on condition that they fight in Ukraine. Like much of the war in Ukraine this tactic is ‘turning the clock back’ to an older and darker period in history. The idea of using criminals as shock troops (or cannon fodder) is not new and persists in some parts of the world.

    During World War Two, Soviet Russia organised ‘penal battalions’ in a similar way. The prisoners were armed and sent forwards compelled to fight by the knowledge that behind them were professional soldiers with orders to kill them if they retreated. Often, in World War Two Soviet penal battalions were ‘harvested’ from the gulags so were as likely to be political prisoners as criminals and were forced to fight. Penal battalions were often used in suicidal ‘human wave’ attacks to wear down defences or sometimes driven across minefields to clear the way ahead of advancing Soviet forces.

    Using people in this manner is cruel, ruthless and barbaric. Tactics like this demonstrate that a combatant’s leadership places little value on human-life. Seeing this sort of barbaric tactic used in the 21st century is very sad.’

    It is also unlikely to be successful, even in World War Two human wave assaults could not overcome the firepower of entrenched defenders. Today with more accurate weapons and higher rates of fire they are even less likely to succeed. Wagner Group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin; ex-cook, ex-convict with no military experience or training is probably not a tactical genius and it is an indictment on Russia’s military governance that this style of war fighting is allowed.’

    GUEST BLOG: Ben Morgan – Get ready because winter is coming in Ukraine

    Anyone who has done ANY research on this stuff knows full well that it is the Ukrainian Nazis (that the Scorpion and LINO support) who are forcing peasants to attack in human waves -or be shot- and that the Ukonazis commit the most heinous crimes, just as their grandfathers and great-uncles did before them.

    .

    #122267
    redshift
    Participant

    Just donated 100€. I’ve been reading TAE for 10 years already, never donated before, I’m sorry for that, you have enlightened me on many topics.

    #122278
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Thanks for the clarity on how the galoots outright block/ban “free speech” on the inter-tubes.
    Keep on keeping on Ilargi…so, so critically important on today’s Orwellian world stage…

    #122280
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Vincent van Gogh Autumn landscape 1885

    Boy oh boy, do I love that van Gogh… 🙂

    #122320
    Tree Frog
    Participant

    I’ve also upgraded membership on Patreon.

    #122326
    Redneck
    Participant

    aspnaz
    “I fear that any new phone manufactured by a Musk company will suffer app starvation.”
    You are correct , I hadn’t thought about that. Everything Musk is involved in is going to be under attack.

    #122393
    Polemos
    Participant

    Dr D Rich, what is “Pink Flamingo” & the NNC?

    I’m unable to limit my search terms to narrow down into likely answers.

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