Is Google Ranking it in From Small Publishers?

There's a concept in business called "the float." It's basically defined as the time period when you hold on to someone else's money, earning interest off of it, before you have to give it to them. Think of the money in your bank account, sitting in PayPal, or sitting in your Google AdSense account. That's the point being made by Nicholas Carr in his Rough Type blog this week.

What Carr is talking about is the Google AdSense $100 rule. Basically, when a publisher opens up an AdSense account, they agree to wait until there is $100 in their account before Google will cut them a check. While many publishers have no problem quickly reaching that $100 mark, many small businesses earn less than a dollar a day, meaning that it will be at least three months (or longer) before Google has to cut them a check. In the meantime, that money sits in Google's bank account earning interest.

Carr points out that even though terminating your account will result in a check being sent by Google (so long as your balance is more than $10), what tends to happen is that advertisers see that little bit of money in there and feel obligated to continue running AdSense ads to try and earn that first $100.

From the post:

Many posters have gone on t note that Google does send checks for outstanding balances at the end of the year, but the point still remains that if you've got hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of accounts sitting under $100 for a full year before you have to cut the check, that's an awful lot of earned interest.