I’ve had the same AdSense account since September 14th, 2004. I’m proud to say that my current total is $47.28 and rising extremely slowly. I’m currently making less than 12 bucks a year on my ads. Now, I don’t really care that much because I have a full time job so I don’t really need the extra cash.

AdSense works by companies or individuals creating ad campaigns and “bidding” on the amount that they will pay for a specific keyword. When their ads are shown on various websites and are clicked on, they pay Google that amount of money. In turn, Google takes a part of that money and “pays” it to the AdSense user. So you see, unless you’ve hit $100, Google retains all of the cash and doesn’t have to pay out anything.

I usually only get a few cents every couple of days, with the exception of one time when my website hit the homepage of Digg.com and I got $21.19 that day.

This got me thinking about how much money Google is making off of all the small websites that are like mine. I know that there are thousands of websites out there that are in similar boat as me. They have set up AdSense accounts, but don’t have enough money in their account to “cash out.” The minimum amount that you can receive in a payment check from Google is $100.

So let’s do a little math here:

10,000 lame blogs, like mine * $47.28 = $472,800 dollars that Google doesn’t have to pay out. So in essense Google is getting all sorts of free money off of AdSense. Brilliant.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.