Pat:
[Please withhold my email address for spam reasons.]
Pat wrote:
> They claim they ... will only pay for those months on which you get
> at least one hundred dollars in revenue, and that they 'reserve the
> right' to not pay that if they choose to charge you for your 'costs'
> in running their search engine or if they decided you were cheating
> on them, etc.
> I have yet to have a single month on which I 'earned' a hundred
> dollars. The closest I have come was last month (November) in which
> they admitted (by their calculation which is the only thing they
> will use) to $98.60. So, of course no check, since it was not the
> hundred dollars they insist on,...
> ... I am thinking very seriously about writing off what I have lost
> on Google Ad Sense unless I can find an attorney willing to sue them
> to try and collect the approximately two hundred dollars they always
> find reasons not to pay on, ...
Pat! Calm down! From the very start, you've expected them to cheat
you, so you assume they are. Not so. You have grossly misunderstood
their payment scheme. For one thing, they WILL pay you what you
earned. They accumulate your earnings from one month to the next
until you reach $100 or more, then they pay you whatever the balance
is. It is NOT a minimum $100 per month or you get nothing. They just
don't want to cut checks for less than $100.
Second, the charge back only applies to Google Search (not the ads)
and only to some very large users of their service. This will
certainly not apply to you. Even to those users, they only charge a
small fraction of the earnings.
As to how they calculate the payments, it depends on how much each
advertiser is willing to pay, and that varies widely from one ad to
the next. They keep less than half, and pay you the rest. True, they
don't give you the exact ratios, but people have figured it out and
there are web sites devoted to this issue. I believe it's about 70/30
(70% to you, 30% to Google). The amount varies depending on the
settings the advertiser has put in, and so it's impossible to compute
in advance what you will earn.
You are seeing duplicate ads (or no ads) because you are expecting
them to serve 12 per page. That is too many, and Google (and others)
suggests you avoid putting that many ads on a page. If you only
offered up the banner (4 ads), it would look and feel better.
All this is explained on the Google Adsense site, and I have
previously suggested you read their FAQ. But, you have repeatedly
railed against them, so I assume you were convinced from the start
that they were out to cheat you. You don't need lawyers. You need
to calm down, wait for your first check, and read their FAQ!
The only real complaint you have is their estimation that you would
earn "several hundreds of dollars per month." You are earning about
$100 per month. Is that really so bad?
Jeff
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thus far I have earned **zero dollars
and zero cents** from their ads, over three months since I started
running their ads. And maybe I was convinced early on that they would
cheat me, but if you actually read their lengthy terms of service,
you'll see where they feel the same way about most of the webmasters.
Don't bot-click, don't play games with key-words, we 'reserve the
right not to pay' etc, as if *they* thought they were in charge of
things around here! And they are very, very secret about *how much*
they choose to pay. I have had days with a dozen click throughs and
Google said it was worth ten dollars; the next day two or three times
as many hits and click throughs and it was only worth ten cents. And
I have never before seen a company which would not state specifically
what its operation costs were (as with Google searches) and 'reserve
the right' to charge that cost back after-the-fact to the webmasters
who were running their ads for them. Why won't Google give any guidelines
on things like this, other than just generic phrases? Anyway, they
pay much, much less on clickthroughs after the search engine than
on ads before it. I thought that markdown was to pay for their costs.
I'd rather see them agree to pay some smaller amount of money, but
*actually pay it* and not play games like they do now. I am expected
to wait for several months before getting any money at all, and even
then I don't know for sure how much it will be until it gets here?
'Bidvertiser' tells you exactly how many pennies they are going to pay
for clickthroughs. PAT]
Jeffrey Mattox ((no email))