Several AdSense publishers from the United States have reported that they received two so call 1099 forms from Google. Concern was expressed that this might cause misunderstandings with the IRS by implying double income. A recent post on Webmasterworld.com now clarifies this issue.

Posted by “AdsenseAdvisor” and reads:

Hi everyone,

I’ve consulted to our payments specialists and they’re aware that some publishers received duplicate 1099 forms. The banking team is investigating the situation, and wanted to assure you that your earnings won’t be reported to the IRS twice.

If you find an error in your tax form (wrong name, wrong tax ID, etc.), please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to correct it. The duplicate form issue, however, is being resolved, so there’s no need for you to write in. If there are any further issues, the team will be sure to contact you.

Sorry for the stress,
-ASA

Have fun,

Marc (who does not live in the US and has no idea what a 1099 is, but felt like passing on the info)

I am kind of surprised that Google sees the need to further clarify the concept of their referral program. But apparently there must’ve been some misunderstandings with the newly introduced “drawing attention” rule that only applies to referral units (Firefox and Google Pack) and not to regular AdSense ads. In their latest blog entry they take the reader by the hand and explain the whole thing again, but this time with an example. Must be one of those american things where everything is a legitimate and reasonable assumption until explicitly clarified and exlcuded (aka “Do not put hamster in microwave”). Kidding, of course ;-)

In short:

[…] Google is willing to pay up to $2 for each new user who downloads and installs Google Pack. If you encourage people to download and install Pack on your site and the conversion rate goes up, we’re happy to pay the additional cost, because it directly translates to more Pack users for us. […] This isn’t the case for most AdSense for content […] Encouraging clicks on these ads not only drives lower quality traffic to an advertiser’s site but provides poor data for an advertiser to make an appropriate bid on the click. This results in a poor experience for visitors and advertisers, which isn’t good for you as a publisher. […]

read it all

Have fun!

Our Google friends have just posted and confirmed the new payment model for Adsense/AdWords referrals. This is what they say

Last year we asked you for your feedback on referrals, and one of the issues we heard quite frequently was that it was too difficult to generate revenue with AdSense and AdWords referrals. To address this, we’ve just introduced a new pricing structure for both programs, which will be as follows:

AdSense Referrals:

• When a publisher who signed up for Google AdSense through your referral earns their first $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you will be credited with $5.
• When that same publisher earns $100 within 180 days of sign-up and is eligible for payment, you will be credited with an additional $250.
• If, in any 180-day period, you refer 25 publishers who each earn more than $100 within 180 days of their respective sign-ups and are all eligible for payout, you will be awarded a $2,000 bonus (bonus payouts are limited to 1 per year).

AdWords Referrals:

• When an advertiser you refer spends $5 within 90 days of sign-up (in addition to the $5 sign-up fee) you will be credited with $5.
• When that same advertiser spends $100 within 90 days of sign-up, you will be credited with an additional $40.
• If, in any 180 day period, you refer 20 advertisers who each spend more than $100 within 90 days of their respective sign-ups, you will be awarded a $600 bonus (bonus payments are limited to 1 per year).

These rules will also apply to users that you have already referred but who have not yet reached one of the new earning/spend thresholds. For example, if you referred an AdSense publisher who has currently earned $2.00, you will be paid $5.00 if that publisher reaches the $5.00 mark. But, if you have referred an AdSense publisher who has already earned $10.00, you will not be paid $5.00 retroactively for that referral reaching the $5.00 mark. However, should that publisher eventually reach the $100.00 earnings mark within 180 days, you will be paid $250.00.

Look at those bonus amounts one can theoretically earn! This will make a lot of publishers with Adsense related or webmaster related content happy, since they are the ones most likely to get their hands on that bonus 2,600$. Isn’t it nice that they also include old referrals?

It appears that Google has changed their payment model for Adsense and Adwords referrals. Instead of having to wait for your referral to earn the first 100$, Adsense publishers now get 5$ per conversion as soon as the referral earns his first 5$ and better even: as soon as that referral reaches the magical 100$ threshold himself, you will earn 250$ more. Making it a possible total of 255$ per conversion. The guys from SE Roundtable quoted Google’s response to an according inquiry

Thank you for the email. I’m happy to say that we’ve now changed the payment model for referrals so you’ll earn more from now on. You’ll, as it has happened, get $5 when a user you’ve signed up earns $5. When the user has earned $100 and complies with the general terms of service for referrals you’ll get additionally $250 on top of the $5 - total $255. This is brand new and we’re right now updating our help center with this information.

A very nice move by Google.  No need to mention that all Adsense publishers will be very happy about this change since most referrals will reach the 5$ mark easily.

Also the recent policy change, now allowing publishers to draw attention to their referral links confirms that Google is heading somewhere very attractive for Adsense publishers and that their referral program still seems to work out for them ;)

I recently found Rory Hansen’s blog through some technorati tags and I must admit that I was quite impressed by a little study which Rory conducted over there (starting with this post). With a 50$ signup bonus budget (for 5$ deposit) Hansen started buying traffic from Yahoo ads, redirecting the visitors to his so called “conversion websites” where Google Adsense referral ads for Firefox would be waiting. A referral conversion typically gerenates a dollar income so Rory did the math and tried attracting more visitors using additional PPC programs, such as Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter by only using the income generated by the 50$ starting budget. It’s like going to the casino with 5$ and managing to leave it again with a full wallet.

Of course, the additional PPC campaigns cost additional money, but in the end it seems to add up perfectly and a nice profit margin results. Very cool, especially since he doesn’t make a secret of the profit, for example december earnings:

Google Adsense: $82.30
Firefox + Google Toolbar Referrals: $2,000.01

Yahoo! Marketing: $435.90
Google Adwords: $539.02
MSN AdCenter: $3.21

Profit: $1,104.18

If you’re into Adsense and like playing with numbers, calculating possible revenues you might really want to check Rory’s blog out.

So if you have been reading my blog (yeah right) you might have read the entry about my successful attempt to do fullsite caching with my Mambo driven website. Because of the way I implemented this caching method, all unregistered users get the same page which ist very fast and therefor great most of the time. Now, I also use Google’s Adsense program on my site which works, as you probably know, simply by including javascript code into your pages. One thing I like doing with Adsense is to serve their referal ads for Firefox or the Google Pack, but since the Google code does not check whether the user is already on Firefox, useless ads are served. Google also lacks a language testing routine, meaning that German users will get the English referal link or banner for either product. This means that these checks have to be done by us, the publishers. We need to identify the users’ preferred language and the browser they’re using. Using PHP that is pretty easy, however, my pages are cached and no longer dynamically served to most of my visitors!

So what to do?

Its a fairly simple trick: We do what Google does! We move our dynamic ad selection routine to a non cached PHP script and implement that via Javascript.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently many Adsense publishers have noticed increasing problems with Google’s response time. According to a post on Search Engine Roundtable and the Google Groups for Adsense webmasters have been receiving complaints from their visitors due to the Adsense Javascript slowing down the time to load pages extremely. This does not only reflect on massively dropping page hits but also seems to cause plunging revenues.

I have been reading about this problem for a few days now and can see a drop in my Adsense income already. Though not personally affected by the delayed ads - I still view them instantly - Google seems to be having a major problem serving their ads to a great number of networks.