sudofox's journal

Austin Burk's journal, where I share little snippets of my writing, code, and dreams.

An Open Letter to Google

I've submitted many appeals to Google in the past, but this one I will be making public as well. This is the content of the Adsense ban appeal that I've just submitted.

Hello!

We're coming up on the seven-and-a-half year mark from when my Adsense account was disabled. I've submitted several appeals, each one denied, and am once again submitting my appeal due to insufficient information provided in your previous responses.

I was fourteen years old then, and just getting into a new hobby of taking apart Nintendo devices and learning about how they work, and decided to start a blog about it. With the help of my parents, I was able to get Adsense set up! It was a pretty exciting time for me...until the Adsense account got disabled.

I was able to work out that a well-meaning friend of mine decided to click on the ads a large number of
times. This led to my Adsense account getting disabled, which although upsetting, did not affect my greatly as I was just a kid between middle and high school.

Times are different now. For several years, I have been growing and fully financially supporting a large community of artists and animators, as well as working on preserving their defining moments in the form of Flipnotes from Flipnote Hatena. As time went on, and the traffic and server demands grew, the financial demands grew as well. As I've expanded and grown, I've tried to motivate people to donate, but had very little consistent success. I needed something more consistent.

I tried Project Wonderful ads, which were not successful. I submitted many appeals but had each turned down without sufficient explanation or information.

I'm in debt now. I'm struggling to pay between $250-275 each month for server bills, and to pay off the hard drives I purchased to archive content from Flipnote Hatena ($1000 - 23 TB of content). I have credit card debt and car payments as well. I need help, desperately, especially when we finish reverse-engineering Nintendo's format so that I can make all of the archived content available to people to watch again, thus preserving the history.

I must beg of you again to please take into consideration the community that I've put years of my life into growing, with my time, my love, and a serious chunk of my finances.

Please let me do my best to grow the community of Sudomemo and of Flipnote Hatena. Please let me do what I need to do to lighten the financial burden that I have to struggle with. For the sake of the entire Sudomemo and Flipnote artist community, please responsibly consider this appeal so that I can reach towards my dream of having the site sustain itself, and towards being free from debt.