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October 27, 2004
Google Adsense Changes Terms and Conditions
Google announced to Adsense advertisers today that they are changing their Terms and Conditions. Accoring to the email:
As a result of publisher feedback, we will not be paying out all accounts at the end of the year. We'll continue to pay publishers on a regular schedule, and will send payments to qualifying publishers with earnings balances over $100. In addition, cancelled accounts will only be paid out if their account has earned a minimum of $10. Please take the time to read the updated Google AdSense Terms & Conditions thoroughly the next time you log in.
Actually, I can be anything but happy to receive this news, and I am sure that there are plenty of small publishers that are much less happy than I am. The combined amount that is accumulated from all cancelled (or non-active for that matter) accounts must sum up to a massive amount of money.
Without having any data in front of me but with pure reasoning on the 'self organized' system of adsense I can guess that it is governed by a power law (so you have few advertisers that make make a lot of money and many advertisers that make very little money). This law is very common in nature - known as Zipf's law - and governs things like the frequency of words in a book, the populations of cities around the world, earthquakes extinctions, comsic rays etc etc. I would be willing to bet that it applies here too.
What is the result of this? The result is that there must be thousands of small time web owners and advertisers that have 'donated' sums of the order of a few dollars to Google and quite a few advertisers that will need many years to sum up $100 in order to get their money - if they ever do get it.
Does this sound like a 'good guys company' to you?
Posted by Basileios at October 27, 2004 03:00 AM
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