Saturday, January 28, 2006

AdSense Referrals Paid Only Within 90 Days

When you make somebody sign up for Google’s AdSense, you get paid $100 as soon as that referred advertiser makes $100. But wait. There’s a footnote to this showing on the bottom of the AdSense referral page:

“An AdSense referral is counted when a publisher, who has never previously enrolled in AdSense, creates an account and earns at least $100.00 within 90 days of sign-up.”

This piece seems to be new, or I missed it so far. At DigitalPoint many think it’s new, and indeed, JenSense found an official screenshot from a Google help page showing no asterisk (I also made a screenshot in November 2005):

The help entry on “How much will I earn from referrals?” doesn’t state this 90 days rule either. It simply states, “When a user you’ve referred to AdSense first earns US $100, we’ll credit your AdSense account with US $100.” (Searching for “90” within the AdSense help or the official Inside AdSense blogs yields no results too.) This can actually be thought of as deceiving; the chance for someone referring an advertiser and then earning money from this are greatly decreased if the advertiser must earn the $100 within the first 90 days.

Over at JenSense, a reader comments:

“That is very sly of Google - they should pay up fair and square – the webmasters out there are doing the work for them, they shouldn’t [throw] barriers in their way.

My first referral didn’t put the code on his pages for two months, and unless his site is a major hit, that’s my lot I think. It took me the best part of a year to get my first cheque on AdSense (then I learnt what I was doing.) I wonder how many more new webmasters will be in that position.

A lot of webmasters will be feeling cheated by that one.”

[Thanks Miel.]

AdSense Referrals Paid On ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

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