professionalism and immorality: how to make money with...

Professionalismand immorality:

How to make moneywith Google AdSense

June 2020

Audit and Investigationby SocialPuncher

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Part 2

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The early years

of Alex Dimitru

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will be counted as active users in the future.behavior, if almost ¾ of them did not even have 10 tweets, and more

than 1/3 never tweeted at all. Specific measurable parameters,

exceeding the limits on which made them locked, have not been

disclosed.

as widely reported.4 accounts have lost more than

3 million followers.

@Oceaanfietser (Ebrahim Hemmatnia) lost 3.9 M of

followers. Three more accounts lost about 3.5

million followers: @AdelAliBinAli (Adel Ali Bin Ali),

@Angelluisr(Angel Rivera), and @dumbassgenius

(Rick G. Rosner). What do these totally different

people have in common? It is hard to believe, but

they had millions of common followers. And most

of them were just affected by the purge.

The purge was fatal for these accounts, their loss

averaged 70%. Three of them before it were on

Twitter top 1000.

On the next page you can see a list of 25 accounts

that lost more than 2 million followers after the

purge. Only 10 Of them were in media reviews in

July 2018. That is, at the moment, only 40% of the

most affected accounts are known.

15 out of 25 (60%) accounts were not covered

(except for David Copperfield, who was

accidentally found). But only these accounts allow

us to understand what really happened during the

cleaning.

IBTimes.com and Newsweek.comaccount for advertising revenue. The same

beneficiary made a profit from the 33

Universal sites during 2013-2018. In 2014-

2015, the Tech Times, Mstarz and at least 4

sites 33Universal received money from

advertisers for the same account as

IBTimes.com and Newsweek.com

In the first part of the investigation, wefound out that Alex Dumitru is a digitalentrepreneur with extensive experience increating sites, promoting and monetizingthem in a variety of ways. But the mainincome throughout his life, he earnedwith Adsense. We can learn his earlyhistory from his blogs, sandossu.com(2006-2009, it is deactivated now) andalexdumitru.com (2009-2012, relaunchedin 2016). Despite the fact that the first bloghas been deleted, and earlier versions ofthe second blog are not available now,their copies are preserved in a web archive.

Alex got basic computer skills very early. Hebegan to use the Internet at the age of 11,and by the age of 15, he worked as a webdesigner. But he soon realized that the onlyway to earn much more was to create yourown sites. He became an Adsense Publisherat 16 by registering an account with hismother. Soon he began to earn more than hisparents. We will not analyze many of hisposts, just quote a piece from Bio.

Who is Alex Dumitru? The first blog: Sandossu.com

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[...] For about a year and a half i builtwebsites and tried to promote them throughspam and a lot of other shitty ways ( bad ),until i heard a term of SEO and opened myeyes. Of course, in the beginning, this wasn’tworking either, but it started to work a bitmore and more, until it got ok, even if i’m noteven close to an expert in search enginemarketing and i think i won’t be too soon.

[...] Currently, i’m still in this market and ithink i will be for long time, as it seems to getbetter and better.

[...] 2008 Update: I run a blog network, thatis currently counting 5 blogs. I like to say that3 of them are quite popular and along withtwo friends and partners we manage toupdate and upkeep them, so we earn a goodprofit while doing something we like. I amplanning on expanding and hiring a few morepeople so we can work easier and better onbuilding more blogs.

Just starting a blog, he sometimes mentionssome of his sites. Their content is clear fromtheir domain names: domains-info.com,latestphones.info, handheldblog.info. Thesewere typical sites with SEO-optimizedcontent and a large number of keywordsthat were popular at that time. They are fullycompliant with Google’s search andadvertising standards for 2006.

Only freetld.net, "my main and best website"as Alex called it, was very different from theothers. This was the site "where you can getabsolutely free domain names with free webhosting." To get a domain you need toregister and earn credits. "You can get morecredits by referring people using your referrallink in the members area." Two months later,the site had 4,000 members. It died in 2007,like most other sites. Alex did not even renewthe expired domain.

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alexdumitru.com/510-how-i-got-over-23-million-visits-in-just-18-months.html

The most interesting post was published onSepteber 24, 2010. It was titled "How I GotOver 23 Million Visits in Just 18 Months".

"I’ve had a lot of successful blogs in the pastand I’ve used social media to drive tens ofmillions of visits to them, though I realizedconversions were much more important thanthe number of visitors so I started focusingmore on SEO. It’s been a good business forme, because I was able to cash in $20-30,000 and I had just turned 18 then.

[...] I have to tell you that my parents weren’table to support me with very much money,as they were earning about $8-9,000 a year,which was much less than me. So I startedworking a lot more and I have had over 500websites just to test everything, from socialmedia to SEO and even blackhat. And thereason I always advise you to do the same isbecause it worked like a charm for me."

His Adsense business was so lucrative,that Alex not only hired several writers andrented the office, but he also appointed hisfriend (one of the writers) as a manager andleft the 9 to 5 work to focus on the newideas. What was the secret of his success?

The post contains only the most commonrecommendations. He pays much attentionto his achievements, and not the realsteps to do this. The most suspicious thatAlex does not mention any of his sites.And this applies not only to thisarticle but to the entire blog. It seems thatthe disclosure of these sites is dangerousfor his business. After he was asked in thecomments about why he was not showing his digital assets, he just came up withexcuses and promised to publish a list ofhis domains, but he never did.

In 2009, Alex's blog changed its design anddomain, it consisted of a real name nowinstead of a nickname, as it was before.

Who is Alex Dumitru? The second blog: Alexdumitru.com

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5https://support.google.com/adsense/forum/ AAAAKDuOfxQQmcQjortIRk/

Who is Alex Dumitru?The ban and the return

He reported this in the comments to

his post about the ban. Despite asking

to tell how he did it, Alex did not answer.

This is a completely absurd situation,

clearly showing the secrecy and non-

transparency of decision-making inside

Google, as well as its absolutely voluntaristic

approach when working with partners.

Google has never reported to advertisers

how many publishers it banned over the

past period, how much ads were shown on

their sites, how much money they received

from Google, and how many banned

publishers returned to the business. But

the lack of this data does not prevent them

from buying ads from Google again.

In early 2011, Google began a fight against black webmasters and low-quality content. On March 22, Adsense banned AlexDumitru's account. He wrote about it on his blog and on the Google support forum (screenshot below).

Alex complained that they did not explainthe reasons, and did not answer letters. Thereal reasons why Google has suspended hisaccount are unknown. Unfortunately, thisoften happens this way for small andmedium publishers, even if there are realreasons for this. Usually, this means the final ban in such cases, the more surprising what happened next. Alex got the Adsense account back in the fall of 2011.

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user to discover it and read it. Stop using a

ton of ads and stop filling the content with

them. Focus on long term development and

do your best to please the user and he will

return. [...]

P.S. I have been planning for a long time to

write this post. But I needed time to actually

try what I’m saying. So I began starting new

websites as of March, so they are new and

clean. I stopped focusing on SEO. No

optimized titles, no link exchange requests

of any kind. [...]

I believe you’re wondering how did the test

go. Here’s one of the websites I began back

in March. It’s 90% organic traffic, with 7%

returning visitors in just 9 months !

6

"It’s well known that Google began a hugefight against spammers and low qualitywebsites. A lot have been penalized or evenbanned. Everyone complains and everyonebelieves he’s been penalized for no reason.While I believe it’s true and some websiteshave really been wrongly penalized, we can’texpect a computer algorithm to be flawless.But the percent of mistakes it did is smalland most of them deserved it.

Most of us have faced penalties and I knowthat I lost some really valuable websites, butI realized that they weren’t really any betterthan the competition. And this is whatGoogle wants. Quality.[...]

This year SEO turned into an UX and contentfight. It’s not about backlinks anymore.Backlinks still work, but you need to getthem naturally, from trusted sources andstop spamming. So you now have to earnand deserve your backlinks. So instead ofwasting time and money buying them orusing spammy techniques, work on yourwebsite and make sure the users love it. Thisway you will begin getting high quality andsafe backlinks. [...]

P.S. I have been planning for a long time to write this post. But I needed time to actually try what I’m saying. So I began starting new websites as of March, so they are new and clean. I stopped focusing on SEO. No optimized titles, no link exchange requests of any kind. [...]

I believe you’re wondering how did the test go. Here’s one of the websites I began back in March. It’s 90% organic traffic, with 7% returning visitors in just 9 months !

return. [...]



Stop focusing on Google’s bot anymore andfocus entirely on the user. Offer high qualitycontent, offer unique content, that can’t befound anywhere else, make it easier for theuser to discover it and read it. Stop using aton of ads and stop filling the content withthem. Focus on long term development anddo your best to please the user and he willreturn. [...]

P.S. I have been planning for a long time towrite this post. But I needed time to actuallytry what I’m saying. So I began starting newwebsites as of March, so they are new andclean. I stopped focusing on SEO. Nooptimized titles, no link exchange requests ofany kind. [...]

I believe you’re wondering how did the testgo. Here’s one of the websites I began back inMarch. It’s 90% organic traffic, with 7%returning visitors in just 9 months !"

www.alexdumitru.com/851-seo-is-better-than-ever.html

But Alex again did not name the site, whichbecame his new successful project. There is nodoubt that an audit of this media asset wouldallow us to make a complete and reliableconclusion about Alex's business. We havefound the site, wich historical traffic is verysimilar to this graph. It still exists and makes aprofit. The digital asset is called "Android Geeks", and uses a domain name Android.gs.

After the ban, Alex wrote only 4 posts athis blog, although he regularly updated itbefore that. The last post of the old versionof the blog was titled "Seo is better thanever" (October 24, 20012). Here are thebasic quotes from this article.

Who is Alex Dumitru? The last post on Alexdumitru.com

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Audit report of

the Anroid Geeks

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In the article "Seo is better than ever",

Alex manifested 3 new principles on which the business of publishers in the new ecosystem will be based:

1. No more SEO texts, only original content.

2. No more link exchange, only organic links.

3. No more ton of ads, only user friendly sites.

It was the end of 2012, just after two

major changes to Google’s search algorithms: Panda lowered the ranking of content farms,Penguin revealed search engine manipulationusing black link schemes. Alex is referringspecifically to these algorithms as the basis forthe success of his new site. Let's now see whatthe flagship site looks like in 2020.

The site is rarely updated now, 2-3 times a

month. In the news feed on the main page wecan find an article of July 19, 2019, and in theFavorites even of April 10, 2019. In 2020,only 6 new posts were published. AlexDumitru is the author of two articles: "Top 3Trustable VPN Apps for Android Devices" and"How to take care of your smartphone'ssecurity?", both were published on January 28.Let's look at the last article to answer 3questions: what content the site has, howmany ad slots and, how many links are placed on the pages.



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Audit report of theAndroid.gs Part 1

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9P.S. I have been planning for a long time to write this post. But I needed time to actually try what I’m saying. So I began starting new websites as of March, so they are new and clean. I stopped focusing on SEO. No optimized titles, no link exchange requests of any kind. [...]


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The smartphone's security article contains 4obvious tips: stop sharing your phone, stopinstalling third-party apps, use a safe browser,update the software. Each of them isexplained in 5 sentences. This is too primitive forAndroid Geeks, which claims to be a nichepublication with an 8-year history. The same thingabout the article about VPN.

In the first 2-3 years, the site published 2-5

short articles (about 200 words) every day. Themain topics were Android updates and newsmartphones. All articles were just a shortenedrewriting from other technical publications. After2014, the content was even more simplified, onlyarticles about new devices remained. These werevery typical texts made strictly according to asingle template. These were not reviews, notcomparisons, not user experience, but simply amonotonous listing of technical parameters.

Audit report of theAndroid.gs, part 2

52 comments on this article contain 1225active links. There is no mistake, the firstcommentary contains 752 links: 188 links thatare repeated 4 times with 4 different anchorwords. After 3 months and 45 comments, the user"chris paul" replied to this comment 7 times, with363 active links inside his posts. This is the mostanomalous page, but the rest of the articles alsohave dozens of comments and each one has atleast one link. Many of them refer to the sites of

companies selling their goods and services. This is

a paid link insertion to increase the Google

search rank.

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Now let's compare the actual businessmodel of Alex’s media asset with themain 3 principles he declared in 2012:

-high-quality content for people,-no link exchanges,-no tone of ads on the pages. As a result, the new reality, which wassupposed to come already 8 years ago, in

2020 looks like this:

1. Low-quality texts, content farm levelarticles, but great SEO and keywords.

2. Dozens of links on each article, none

of which are related to the context.

3. Up to 13 ad slots on the page, even shorttext is interrupted by ads after each paragraph.

This page has only 9 banners, but usually, the article has 12-13 ad slots. Often this is an advertisement of large technical brands,Microsoft, Linkedin, Cisco, as well as otherwell-known companies. A regular publisher cannot place as many ads on one page, but for some special publishers who are clients of certain ad techcompanies, this is allowed. Analysis of the site code allows us to identify such a company, it is a Certified Google Publishing Partner Ezoic. Android.gs began this partnership in July 2019, before that the site used the similar service of another company.

Audit report of theAndroid.gs, part 3

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This is not the only asset of Alex Dumitru.After 2012, many more sites were launched,most of them no longer exist, but some arestill active. They also have anomalies inaudience behavior, but of a different type. We not analyze these sites here, and not even mention these domains. Due to the opacity of Google’s actions, we sometimes leave a number of facts out of the report in order to track Google’s actions regarding this publisher.

Audit report of the

Android.gs, part 4

In 2018, the site was updated less and lessand was slowly losing its audience. Fromseveral million visits a month in 2013-2017,by the end of 2019, there were only100,000-200,000 visitors.

The main source of traffic all this time hasbeen Google search. Over the years, the sitefailed to create the core of regular readers,which would be the basis of the publication.Most of the audience comes to the articles2012-2016 using old search keywords.

The visitors of the site behaves periodicallyin an anomalous manner. It has obviousweekly repeating cycles with spikes on thesame day of the week. There can be two reasons for this: either real users who coordinate a flash mob on this site on some secret forum every week, or these are simulated users controlled by a digitalalgorithm.

How much did the Android.gs website earn?The monthly traffic of 1-2 million visitsallows you to sell 50-100 millionadvertising impressions per year. At theprices of those years, this is several hundredthousand dollars a year. The highly profitableperiod of this asset lasted as long as 4 years(2013-2017), according to our estimates, thetotal revenue is about $1 million. Withother assets, it definitely exceeds this amount.In several posts, Alex stated that he had stable 5-digit monthly Adsense earningsfrom 18 years, and the facts confirm this.In terms of total revenue, Alex is anAdsense millionaire. This is its main andalmost the only source of income, and itskey asset is still Android Geeks.

Over the past 6 months, the site has beenearning by inserting paid links, theirnumber is currently in the thousands.

The audience of this site behaves verysuspiciously: repeating algorithmic cyclesare traced in its behavior, popular searchkeywords relate to articles from 2012-2016, user comments are fake.

currently in the thousands.

Over the past 11 months, the site hasbeen using the Certified GooglePublishing Partner Ezoic to maximizeadvertising revenue. Traffic for this periodamounted to about 2 million visits.During this time, the site published only29 new articles, 12 of which in July 2019.

Summary: The significance of this case

for the digital ad industry,

brands and journalism

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Cheating users on two clone sites is just

the tip of the iceberg. This is just a simpleindicator, which clearly shows whatmethods of making money are acceptablefor typical Adsense publisher.

It is unlikely that you can be an honestpublisher for 14 years who really values hisreputation, to work hard, attracting anaudience to his resources, and then cheatthousands of users by continuing to ask donations after receiving $5,000 for the host expenses, although even $50 would be more than enough.

And that’s all after at least $20,000 has already been earned from advertising on this site. We see that any problem that attracts the attention of people for many publishers is simply becoming a new source of income, not donations from them, which could be expected from looking at their income and declared principles.

Alex is formed, educated, and funded by Adsense. From an early age, he knew how to adapt to all Google’s requirements, comply with all the ad tech ecosystem rules at every new stage, used all the opportunities to make money that had not yet banned. Such behavior was not only

not prohibited, but even encouraged, those who did so can get more money. And the rest of the publishers, who did not use every opportunity, lost the competition. When a global pandemic happens, he decides that the best way to earn money is to get the donations for a site that just copying real-time statistics of coronavirus statistics from a major source. And also to make the second same site for your long-term partner, who raised money on this scheme too, although he is a real practicing doctor in Romania.

Social Puncher does not specialize in charityand digital donation fraud investigations. Ourmain area is the audit of digital assets andonline audience, therefore we focusspecifically on the problems of the ad tech industry, which were highlighted in this case.It was precisely the fact that the creator of thedonation fraud scheme turned out to be thelong-standing Adsense publisher thatprompted us to write this report.

How does this case characterizea typical Adsense Publisher?

Charity projects help those in need. The

free distribution of information should help everyone. Commercial projects whoseowners receive superprofits from the freedistribution of stolen texts, files, or data or arecalled digital piracy. Fundraising for suchprojects is clearly fraud. The fact that the adindustry is working with such publishersshows us that it can turn a blind eye tofraudulent schemes if they are profitable.

What Alex Dumitru’s digital business really

is if Corona.help is his main project in 2020?

fraudulent scheme has become his main

project in a critical situation?

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Google may argue the opposite, but this istoo obvious an example of how you can sellads and paid links simultaneously on thesame site. Moreover, this can be done openlyand on a large scale: Android Geeks has anaverage of a dozen advertising slots and 3dozen links on one page, and the number oflinks is increasing every month.

The main conclusion of the second part ofour investigation is rather unexpected andeven discouraging. In mid-2020, a site that isboth a link farm and a content farm withalgorithmized traffic receives millions of thebest advertisements from Google through itscertified partner. After 10 years of purges andthe fight against ad fraud, we find a sitethat cannot exist now at all.

It casts doubt on the result of all this

struggle and the effectiveness of all

algorithms of artificial intelligence created for

this. Google pays advertisers money to a

site that violates as many as 3 its own

rules. Either Google does not see this, orit sees, but ignores it. But the result is thesame, this did not entail any actionagainst the publisher.

Google really removed most of the primitivesearch manipulation schemes in 2011-2012.But when it came to more sophisticatedtechniques, the algorithms showed theircomplete futility. In addition, Penguin andPanda are search algorithms, they are notdesigned to deal with advertising fraud.Violation of these search manipulation rulesdoes not imply the inevitable Adsense ban forthe publisher. Google search and GoogleAdsense are not related to each other. This isthe second surprising conclusion thatsuggests itself following the results of thiscase.

How does this case describe the current digital industry?

Are there other reasons why Google doesnot see these violations, except for theimperfection of its algorithms? Perhaps the problem is that Google earns 30% ormore on every ad impression. Why is itnecessary to ban a profitable publisher, if onlyGoogle and no one else decides whether itviolates the rules or not?

While there are no complaints fromadvertisers, none of the ad companies will ban their publishers. No one will voluntarily reduce the number of ad impressions to refuse its own profits. The advertiser's employees do not want to cause a scandal, moreover, all impressions are approved by verification companies. The current system is designed in a such way that the advertisercould not make a claim even if a large adfraud scheme is exposed. This is a viciouscircle where brand employees are silent,although their companies are losing millions,and the ad industry is turning a blind eye toshadow publishers, only because it is veryprofitable for it.

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Thanks to programmatic, these sites areprotected from verification by the advertiser.There is not a single brand that would besignificantly affected by a single site. Itadvertises thousands of companies, and eachof them loses maybe only a hundreddollars per month here. This is clearly not thereason to arrange an internal investigationof inefficient advertising costs.

But if there are hundreds of thousands ofsuch sites, the damage is already substantial.An advertiser cannot study all such sitesin detail, it has neither the time nor thecompetencies for it. Moreover, Googleshould already have done this for itsclients. But here is an obvious example thatGoogle does not study its publishers verycarefully, especially their old assets, whichhave long been marked as reliable.

The question is how many such sites. Afterall, Alex Dumitru cannot be the only one whodoes business in this way. It exists onlybecause an ideal ecosystem has been createdaround for people like him.

There are agencies that offer black SEO(often disguised as white SEOs), there arehundreds of companies that optimizeadvertising, there are thousands of sellers andbuyers of traffic and content. Thousandsof publishers use this ecosystem, and some ofthem earn only thanks to this service. As aresult, the advertiser pays them all,because this is the only source of money inthe ad tech industry.

If brands only lose part of their advertisingbudgets due to shadow publishers, forjournalism it is a matter of life and death. Realmedia, which have a large staff and manyother expenses, have to compete for theadvertiser with such shadow publishers everyday. They do not have original content, theircosts for attracting an audience are negligible,but their revenue from each ad display is the same as for real digital media.

All publishers compete on equal termsnow, although they should play indifferent leagues. Just connect to acertified publishing partner and any shadowwebmaster becomes a premium publisher.Obviously, the one who has lower costs andguaranteed profit (since it is possible to buytraffic) will win the competition, and thosewho have high costs and declining revenuewill gradually die out.

It is not surprising that the local press isslowly dying, large publishers are cutting staff,more and more publications are switching toa subscription model, despite the fact that thedigital ad market is growing year by year. Thepoint is not only that most of the profit comesfrom social networks and video platforms. The problem is that unknown, but verysuccessful publishers have incredibly highincomes from money, which should bedistributed among real media.

Why are such publishers harmfulto brands and journalism?

pur

ge

and

rec

ove

ry.

Vlad ShevtsovThe director of investigations

for Social Puncher

Signal: [email protected]

Media asset audit and verification

Evaluation of ad cost effectiveness

Digitalinvestigations

Social Puncher is the only

independent digital auditor, notaffiliated with the ad tech industry.

Social Puncher uses only its

own researches and investigations

in the reports and other public

actions. All published facts and

numbers can be verified by any

third party using open data sources.

Social Puncher lways reveals the

organizers and beneficiaries of

various ad fraud schemes, revealing

the maximum available information.

Social Puncher is ready to defend

in court the results of any published

investigation.

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