Sean's blog

Google AdSense up again

I posted an article about a surprise ‘unavailable’ message I got last time I visited Google AdSense. That sort of article really deserves a follow-up, so I checked online and found a useful post at the Digital Point forum that refers to AdSense’s own blog at BlogSpot.

There you can read an article about ‘Site maintenance’. I’m glad to be able to track down some comment from Google’s AdSense team about this issue. But I did have to put some effort into finding out why I couldn’t access my AdSense account – was that really necessary? The page they serve says:

The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable.

– well, duh! Tell me something an error 404 wouldn’t!

Please try back later.

– why? Will it be up then? I did try, several times, it was futile.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

– but you don’t explain why you have inconvenienced me.

Would it really have been so difficult to include a link to the blog entry? Or some other Google asset on the web that told me why the site was unavailable, for how long it would be unavailable, and what benefit it is to me? Such an unhelpful ‘site down’ message strikes me as surprisingly lame for such a large organisation.

As for the AdSense blog entry at Blogspot, there is some useful information in there, like when and how long the site will be down for, but I have the following questions:

If it’s regular maintenance, why do you need to tell us? Surely there should be a well-known Google page that lists your regular maintenance service interruptions. Perhaps I’m being pedantic, and they mean regular as in ‘regular fries’ at a fast food shop. As a friendless pedant, I’m always tempted to answer the ‘regular fries?’ question with ‘No, just on this occasion please’. But I don’t, even pedants feel shame. Having a look back through the blog’s previous posts on maintenance, I get the impression there’s no regularity about the maintenance events, so we’ll go with the regular-like-fries explanation.

OK, so if it’s just regular as in common-or-garden maintenance, why less than a day’s notice? I book my car into the garage weeks in advance of it needing regular maintenance. Even if it starts leaking oil, I still book it in at the weekend. To be honest, I only looked back through previous posts to the maintenance post before this one, and saw that it was still less than 24 hours that time.

Why the blasé tone? Google AdSense is a great service, and I can see a lot of effort goes into continuously enhancing it. Which makes the response when things aren’t going so well even more surprising. You do have a great many fans among your customers, but not all of them will appreciate being invited to sing along with your blog post. Some of your more adept and long-term customers may be used to the occasional outage and really not be concerned about it at all. Newer or less confident users won’t feel very helped at all by someone calling them ‘n00b’. Web services support businesses the same way electricity, roads and water do – some people will feel just as upset by the sudden absence of AdSense as they do of any other service.

I feel better now, a good rant always clears the air. Clint Eastwood’s character in The Outlaw Josey Wales sums up my feelings on the AdSense blog post nicely:

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”

You have a great weekend too.