If you look down the side of this post, you will see some sort of advertisement, and like the majority of people I took the easy way out and chose Google to supply the ads. Of course as this blog site is a personal site of somebody who comes a long way from being famous, the amount of money that comes in is negligible. In fact I have not received a single payment as yet.
Nothing wrong with that of course – it is stated quite plainly that payments are only made when the level reaches a certain level – who needs a cheque for £0.99 ? It would cost Google more to send them out than the payments themselves are worth.
But the interesting thing is what happens to all those negligible amounts of money ? Don’t forget that morally, that money does not belong to Google: Someone who wants to advertise something online, pays Google, and Google in turn pays whoever provides online “space” to allow the advertisements to appear. As soon as the adverts appear on my (or your) blog, Google owes me money.
The interest on my queued payments is pretty negligible, but how many other sets of negligible payments are there in Google’s bank accounts ? And how much interest is Google earning ?
Or should I say “stealing” ? Don’t forget that money is owed for services rendered – it doesn’t belong to Google at all, and if Google is making any money at all through interest, then it is morally obliged to do something with that interest other than add it to the bottom line.
Now personally I’m not interested in receiving the interest on the money Google owes me – it’s a trivial amount to me. But added up together with the trivial amounts owed to thousands of others, it may well make a difference to some charity or other. What I would like to see is an extra tab on my Adsense console letting me choose which charity Google should pay the interest to.