|
Visa does business with credit-card clearinghouses, who in turn have their own standards for selecting clients. Back when I was a one-person software company, with office & production facilities in a spare bedroom, I accepted credit cards (this was long before PayPal). I could have been anyone. True, they sent a rep out to take a picture of the "facilities" -- he helped me hang the convention banner over my computer desk, and we posed a few software boxes as accents. But that's all it took. The banner was home-made, and the boxes were from Uline, in sleeves that I got printed at a local copy shop. I could have been totally bogus. So you can't really blame them for processing credit cards for shady merchants -- most of the time, they don't deal with the merchants directly.
And Google certainly can't vet every person and company who wants to buy AdWords. Well, they could, but then nobody but Microsoft and Apple could afford to advertise; at best, anyone else would have to wait six months for approval. Newspapers don't do it either, by the way, nor do magazines. If you want to buy an ad selling whatever-the-heck in any major publication, they don't do a background check on you; the only check they care about is the one they cash.
And a nice website proves exactly one thing: Someone can make (or buy) nice websites. I could build a website as nice as any Fortune 500 company (and better than many) and it would mean ... zilch.
|