$200K Worth of Invalid AdSense Clicks?
A reader pointed me to this WebmasterWorld thread (registration required) from an AdSense Premium publisher who normally makes between $50,000 and $100,000 a month in AdSense earnings. The publisher's been told by Google that $200,000 worth of invalid clicks have been attributed to his account and that they're going to be debiting his future earnings to recover the $200K.
Now, I know some of you are going to say I wish I had those kinds of problems, but we don't know how much of that $75K per month (on average) is profit. It's not unusual for sites at that end of the spectrum to spend a lot of money on traffic acquisition and on bandwidth/hosting costs. For example, they might spend say $25K on AdWords and other pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to their sites. Earnings does not equal profits.
Despite the $200K chargeback, though, the publisher is still very positive about Google:
…if not for Google, I would have been making probably 1% of what I make without the changes and help they gave me. I thank Google to this day for giving me that opportunity…. I intend (and hope?!) to stay with Google Adsense, because quite honestly, they've treated me really well, given me some breaks, and helped me to help myself!
This chargeback comes shortly after Google made changes to its pricing algorithms to penalize poor quality sites, so I wonder if this is the first major example of a site falling prey to the new rules.
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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.
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