November 4, 2009Half a Billion Dollars
That’s how much this article says that Google has outstanding in unpaid dollars for Adsense.
The Google Float is the amount AdSense publishers have accrued in earnings but have not yet been paid. You know, all those people that haven’t reached the $100 mark that triggers a payment. The figure is currently at $532,547 million. That’s over a half billion dollars. If Google killed AdSense, they would have to pay that all out.
One interesting thing about the AdSense float is that it increased last quarter by 3%. In the 2 previous quarters it decreased. I wonder if this was due to all the AdSense accounts that were disabled recently.
Tell me there’s no incentive to start figuring out ways to avoid paying out those funds.
I myself have seen one strategy… Google simply stopped paying me. That’s not the actual process, but that is the net result. I have more than one post about how the search links from Google had been starting to pay more than Adsense for Content. A couple of months ago (September) Google fixed that: the took 100% of my search earnings (yes, that’s correct, I wrote 100% as in all of it) for a “search costs” adjustment. This fee isn’t new… or rather the ability of Google to apply this fee is not new. It’s covered in several places on their site and in their terms and conditions.
What are the fees mentioned in the Terms and Conditions?
Adjustments
The problem that I have with this is after almost five years of zero adjustments I find it irritating, frustrating, and in fact downright suspicious that Google has decided that my “costs of search” now equal my entire search revenue amount.
For two months in a row.
I sent Google an email. I got a form letter back.
I have removed Google from my sites.
Comments (1)
Still no response other than a form letter.
But I did hear from them in another way… they deducted 100% of my search revenues for October as well.
Comment by Dave Rathbun — November 5, 2009 @ 9:04 am