BY JIM EDWARDS DEC 18, 2014 12:46 PM
A Bunch of Companies Are Suing Google Over Its Ad Policies
This article originally appeared in Business Insider.
Small businesses and tech startups are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in search ad revenue from Google because they have difficulty following the company’s policies. One company, Pubshare, has sued Google for nearly $1 million in revenue it allegedly earned from ads, which Google declined to pass on to the company.
The company is owned by Peter Ogtanyan, according to a copy of his lawsuit filed in a California state court. Pubshare published humorous viral images for social media, like “mind-blowing street art.” It used Google’s AdSense software, which allows companies to run Google search ads on their site and gain revenue from them. He gained 300 million views and 1.5 million clicks via AdSense, with a click-through rate of 0.45 percent, his suit says. That traffic generated about $1 million between September 2013 and October 2013, the suit alleges, before Google sent him this notice saying it would not pay any of the money his ads had earned:
