Google Banned Me from Helpouts

Google is currently the King of search. The sheer amount of data which resides on Google servers (67,000,000,000 pages indexed) combined with the staggering number of searches per day (5,740,000,000 in 2014), makes Google the top dog. Google is also a very innovative company, encouraging employees to try new things. With a market capitalization of $250 BILLION dollars, they’ve got plenty of room to play in the sandbox. Sometimes they get it right. But sometimes they get it wrong. Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google Knol and Google Reader join many other projects in the Google graveyard. Some of them were good ideas with poor implementation or adoption. Others were just bad ideas. Google Helpouts, a person-to-person live helpline leveraging Hangouts technology, has just joined the list of projects that will be laid to rest in the Google graveyard. This email was just sent to members of Google Helpouts: I can’t say I’m surprised. Helpouts had a great deal of promise. A way for people with expertise and authority to monetize their time by providing live coaching for those seeking advice, you could login to Helpouts and pay by the minute or time block and video-conference live to get the answers you needed. I signed up for Helpouts very early on and did a number of coaching sessions, all of which received 5-star feedback from those I consulted. As the individual who has taught tens of thousands of people how to make money with Google AdSense via my books, products and trainings, I figured it was very natural to create a product which would help people leverage Google’s Helpouts product. I was a big fan. (Still am and it’s disappointing to see that they failed.) A partner and I set up a training product at HelpoutsProfits.com. We opened the doors to customers and received plenty of excellent feedback. Google wrote and asked that we change the name of the product since Helpouts was a copymark of theirs. I told them “no problem” and we renamed the product ThePaidExpert.com. It was the same training with a different, and more accurate, branding. It was around the same time that I showed up for a scheduled Google Helpouts session and discovered I was face-to-face with a member of the Helpouts team. Turned out they were aware of my product and decided to do some recon on me. The guy on the other end was very nice. I explained what I was doing and what the product was all about. My goal was to offer a product which would help people leverage the power of Helpouts to grow their business and brand. About a week later, I received this email. How about that. All attempts to contact the Helpouts team were met with “Our decision is final.” I’m still not exactly sure what the problem was. I complied with changing the name of the product immediately. I told the Helpouts team precisely what I was doing. My account was compliant. And the feedback from Helpouts I delivered was flawless. I believe, and I might be wrong, that the Helpouts team didn’t want anyone profiting off teaching others how to profit with their system. In fact, I got the feeling that while they had a monetization system in place, they weren’t really comfortable with it being a commercial system to begin with. So, they turned away an unpaid evangelist, shutting me out from being able to do my own Helpouts. Even today, when I go to helpouts.google.com with the banned account, I am greeted by this reminder. I really don’t have ill will against Google or the Helpouts team. What bothers me most is that they had a ally that wanted to help promote their product and spread the word. They knew they were working with a reasonable person willing to make adjustments as required. In fact, the ban took place over a year ago. I decided not to write about it at that time because I didn’t want to give even the slightest appearance of vindictiveness. If anyone asked me about Helpouts, I told them that I was still a proponent of the product. Now that they are shutting their doors, I feel it’s appropriate to discuss it, if for now other reason that the heavy-handed approach that just cuts off a customer without providing a reason (and a rememdy) is just bad business. Unfortunately, Google has a reputation for treating people this way with many of their products. While they must be aware and alert to fraud that is inevitably a very real threat to their products, there’s no shortage of good people who have lost AdSense or AdWords accounts without explanation. I’m not saying that partnering with me, instead of banning me, would have resulted in a successful product for Google. But it couldn’t have hurt. Rest in Peace, Google Helpouts. I forgive you.