Google Adsense have bolloxed up NZ payments
Well done Google Adsense. </sarcasm>
For those people who have New Zealand bank accounts, the June 2012 Google Adsense payment was made incorrectly – Google inverted the exchange rate, meaning that everyone was only paid 60% of what they were supposed to be paid. New Zealand publishers awoke to this email:
SUBJECT: Important update about your recently issued AdSense payment
Dear publisher,
We’re writing to let you know about an issue with your June 2012 payment from AdSense. As you may have realized, an incorrect exchange rate was applied for this payment. As a result, the amount you received was only a portion of the earnings owed. We have already issued a credit to your account, and the remaining amount will be sent in a separate transaction in a few days.
We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
There’s no excuse for this – simple system checks should have prevented (or at least warned) that an exchange rate was used that was wildly different to last month’s. However, not only that, Google screwed up the correction as well. A few days later, we were treated to this email:
SUBJECT: Important update about your recently displayed June AdSense earnings
Hello,
We recently contacted you to inform you of an incorrect exchange rate used when calculating your June 2012 AdSense payment.
As we work to fix this problem we issued a credit for the portion of earnings owed to you along with displaying your June AdSense earnings. You may have noticed that the adjustment credit amount issued to your account is incorrect. Rest assured we will correct this adjustment amount and this will be reflected in your account early next week.
Shortly after we will pay out your June earnings plus the correct portion of earnings owed to you as a result of the incorrect exchange rate.
We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
And, proving that Google have abandoned their “Don’t be evil” motto, they did not provide a “separate transaction in a few days” as they promised, rather, they issued it as a credit to your Google Adsense account. For me, that means I have to wait a couple of months before I’ll get the underpayment while I wait for my account to get above US$100 (the lower limit).
But, for those people who don’t get a lot of traffic and took a long time to get to their US$100 lower limit, they will have to wait for it to get up to US$100 again to get the repayment – remember, this was entirely Google’s fault, yet we suffer for it. And of course – there’s no email address or telephone number for them.
SHAME ON YOU GOOGLE.
Back in December 2009, when I wrote this post, I would have been very annoyed about this mistake.
You watch, now that I’ve written this, Google will probably cancel my account. In their terms and conditions is probably something like “Thou shalt say nothing bad about the almighty Google, or thy soul shall become payable to Google along with thy first-born”.