Ages ago — pre-AdSense days — I signed up as an Amazon associate. I never
earned much despite those oh-so-carefully targeted product links once on my
Doogie Howser Meets Starship Troopers
page or a few other places where I had them. Google AdSense — without even
trying — left Amazon referral fees in the dust.

That’s why it’s so pathetic the email I get each month. It starts out
promisingly enough:

Dear Amazon.com Associate,

It’s time again for referral fee payments to our Associates! We have
reached the end of April 2007, and we have just sent payments to eligible
Associates for the referral fees earned during the past month.

This is always followed by the same depressing message:

Your earnings, including any credit balance from previous payment periods,
did not reach the minimum referral fee threshold for your payment method. We
have credited your April referral fees to your account for a future payment.

The email then goes on with all this information about getting payments,
important notices and so on. That all makes up the bulk of the email when all I
really need to know is nope, I earned nothing.

Out of curiosity, I checked to see what exactly Amazon was holding in reserve
for me. Turns out, the princely sum of $68.35 since my last payment back in
October 2000 (yes, two thousand). I earned $0.32 in April 2007, then the same
amount before that for February 2007, then amazingly the highest amount ever
from Amazon, $28.49 for the fourth quarter of 2006. Wow!

Most of that was for three separate digital picture frames that were
purchased through Amazon, from a link from my page about
digital picture frames. So, I
guess those links aren’t a complete waste of time. Still, without much work or
effort, AdSense generated about $800 for the same time period.

Minor rant here, about being sick and tired of seeing the same pitch for
North Cyprus property over and over again on Digg. Can’t Google give them any
better ad inventory for UK visitors to see? And while I’m ranting, what’s with
the "free" XBox 360 ad that Google’s allowing to slip past the quality police?

I’d say most people who visit Digg see ads at the top of the page like this:

or if there’s not set of ads delivered up by Google, you probably get the
always popular pitch for the Digg podcast:

Now me, I’m over in the UK. And I’m virtually certain this means I’m getting
treated to this favorite ad that most people in the US probably don’t see:

I see this ad all the time. I’ve seen it day in, day out for weeks. I’ve seen
it so many times I wish that Google would have another link next to that "Ads by
Google" link called "Never show me this ad again." Then I could banish this ad
from my sight forever.

I’ve got no problem with North Cyprus. I actually love Northern Cyprus. I was
there on vacation back in 2002. My in laws were stationed in
Cyprus back in the 60s as part of the British forces and talked about there time
there often. One year, we went back with them.
Went to Northern Cyprus because unlike the south, it’s far less
developed. I wanted a better sense of how things used to be like. It’s
beautiful. Here’s the harbor city of Kyrenia, or Gime using its Turkish name,
from one of my photos:

Heck, I might even be interested in Northern Cyprus property some day. But
that would have to come after the entire divided island of Cyprus issue gets
resolved. For those not up on the island, it’s been divided since 1974 into the
Greek-dominated and internationally recognized southern Republic Of Cyprus and
the Turkish-dominated and generally unrecognized Turkish Republic Of Northern
Cyprus in the north. Wikipedia gives some history
here.

This leads me to those ads being UK targeted. As a former UK colony, the
island is popular with Brits. Brits also love to get in on housing booms.
Property in the south is far more expensive than in the north. So there’s been a
wave of Brits wanting to beat the "land rush" and buy in the north.

The problem is that some of that northern property was formerly owned by
people who fled to the south. And since Cyprus is now part of the European
Union, that means Brits buying property could find themselves vulnerable to
lawsuits in cases where title is unclear. Here’s one

article about a couple that lost an appeal in 2005 brought against them
through UK courts. Here’s the UK government
warning about
such purchases last year.
Here’s
a collection of some related articles.

So much as I liked Northern Cyprus, I’m not going to be buying property. And
I’d really like to see some other ads on Digg, just for a change of pace.

A side note here. I’ve visited two divided cities in my life: Berlin and
Nicosia, on Cyprus. Berlin, of course, is no longer divided. Indeed, six months
after I first visited it with the wall up, I was back during the New Year’s
celebration after the wall had come down. What a contrast. I’m looking forward
to seeing how it has changed since then, when I finally return to the city in
March.

Nicosia remains divided. Visiting that city took me back to what seemed hard
to imagine ever happened, the division of Berlin.

Finally, I leave Cyprus to discuss the Xbox 360. Let’s go back to that Cyprus
ad:

See that Xbox ad below it, down there on the right? Here, let’s zoom in:

I had to chuckle. Are you REALLY going to send me a free Xbox for answering
five questions? That’s the promise, and it’s the type of promise that gets
someone like Ben Edelman upset over fake "free ads," as I
wrote about
recently.

Just for fun, I decided to see how it played out. I arrived at a page asking
for my email address. I gave it a fake one. Then I had to enter my "shipping
address." I gave it a fake one. Then I got to this:

Offer? What’s the deal about offers? I thought I just had to do a survey,
right? Down at the bottom of the page, you’re told:

So not only do I have to participate in an offer — which the ad never
mentioned — but then I’ve got to "Refer Friends" to manage to get to the
mystery "Level 3" for my Xbox. What did that ad say again?

So much for answering a 5 question survey. Well, I’ve got an Xbox already.
And a 360. And
Viva
Piñata for it rocks. But my
Wii rocks more. Someday I’ll write more about them, too!

As anyone can see, I run AdSense here on Daggle. It’s more for playing and
seeing how it works than any big money maker. At some point, I’ve promised
Jennifer Slegg to go onto her
Click This!
podcast and throw all my AdSense newbie questions her way. There are so many
things I find odd about how it works. This post is about one of those, trying to
get paid in US dollars if you’re not based in the US.

As my traffic went up and my AdSense placements improved, I started getting a
check each month, rather than once or twice per year. These checks come to me in
US dollars, sent to my UK address. Depositing them either meant waiting until my
next trip back to the US, to put them in my bank there, or firing them off to my
US dollar account with Citibank UK (which I
highly recommend for any
expats). The account is great, but it started to be a pain to be mailing these
physical checks off to Citibank.

I decided to get all digital and have my funds sent electronically to my US
bank in the US. I headed over to the My Account area in AdSense, went to Account
Settings, Payment Details, Add A New Bank Account and stalled.

There was no place to give my US account number and bank routing number.
Instead, everything was oriented for UK accounts, which use sort codes and
account numbers. Ugh.

I asked AdSense support about this and was told that I could only have
electronic payments made to my listed country of residence — the UK — for "tax
and security" reasons.

Ah, security. I can’t tell you the number of times that gets trotted out when
I have to deal with some banking issue in the US from the UK. I usually feel
it’s just a convenient excuse for "you’re a weird situation, we don’t want to
deal with that."

Fine. How about changing my account to a US address. Nope, it turns out you
can’t do that. Once you list a country for your AdSense account, apparently you
have to live in that country for all eternity. There goes my plans to retire
back home in California. Thanks, AdSense, for robbing me of my golden years

Alternatively, you can close your AdSense account and create a new one, I was
told. I declined that fun option. Instead, I decided to do EFT to my US dollar
account that’s based in the UK.

That led to another problem. To verify an account, AdSense makes a small
deposit. I could see this arrive in my account. However, I couldn’t complete
verification because AdSense wanted the amount in UK pounds.

I didn’t know the amount in UK pounds, since this was a dollar account. To
know the amount, I’d have to know what exchange rate Google was using
internally, which isn’t listed. Why not try some guestimates? Well, you get four
tries, then you lock out that account for EFT purposes permanently.

I followed up with Google on this, and it got even more complex. AdSense
support said it was likely Google converted from dollars to pounds to send the
deposit, then the bank converted again from pounds back to dollars since this is
a dollar-based account. What a pain!

So there it sits, my account all unverified. Meanwhile, I was able to set up
a UK pound account to do EFTs. The downside to this is that the payments will be
changed to whatever rate Google decides, rather than you changing up when you
prefer.

That brings me to an email I got from AdSense today, telling me to sign-up
for EFT! Out of the blue, it highlighted all the problems I had:

• We can only make EFT payments to bank accounts in your country of
  residence. This means that if your AdSense account is in the US, we can’t
  make payments to your UK bank account.
   
• We can only make EFT payments in your local currency. For example, if
  you live in Canada but your bank account is in US dollars, your bank may not
  accept these payments or they may convert your payment to US Dollars. So
  that your AdSense payment is not converted twice, we recommend that you use
  a bank account in your country’s local currency.

I hope these problems go away. In particular, I’d urge AdSense to:

• Make it possible to change your country of residence.
   
• Make it possible to pay to accounts in more than one country.
   
• Make it possible to indicate the base currency of an account in any
  country, so that I can ensure dollars into a UK-based dollar account stay in
  dollars. Yes, Virginia, people outside the US can indeed have accounts based
  in dollars.

If it helps, link some of these extended options to what tax information is
provided to AdSense. Google has my US taxpayer ID. They know I’ve got a US-based
connection. There’s no particular security reason to then prevent me from paying
into a US-based account.