08.22.15

Be Evil, like Google or Alphabet

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:46 pm by George Smith

This week’s personalized joke from the digital sharing economy came to me courtesy of Google and Price Waterhouse Cooper.

Years ago I was partially sold hoodwinked into putting Google AdSense into my blog posts at GlobalSecurity.Org. For the sake of revenue sharing.

I started sometime in 2009 and quickly discovered the ads were the Internet’s dog shit, or worse, low level nuclear waste.

At different times they hawked military challenge coins — cheap badges for military men and hanger-ons with less brains than 99 cent cans of minced clams. Ammo boxes. Water storage containers for those convinced the end of civilization was nigh. Fake degrees in intelligence work peddled by schools that exist only as post office boxes in a strip mall. Ads for what appeared to be a prostitution ring specializing in Chinese women. Police training, in 2011. (How to shoot African Americans and the miscellaneous poor, I presume.) Ads for offshoring American manufacturing jobs to the Baja and harmonica lessons.

Nobody in my audience, and I did have one, would click on such things. I came to think, too, that only people with something seriously wrong inside would. And now that’s old news. We’re well into an era of giant, nuisance, multi-media scripting ads that chase you around the web, hog your resources, try to hijack your browsing for the benefit of corporate America, make websites unusable, spy on you, and frequently deliver viruses and extortion software as a bonus.

I stopped paying attention to the Google AdSense account in 2011.

I calculated the alleged revenue here:

In practice, “revenue sharing??? with anything Google means Google gets all the share.

That’s because AdSense, as a model, makes no sense for individual writers. Even if they plaster it all over their pages.

The ads are always woefully inappropriate. The algorithm that chooses them is dumber than dirt. And the click throughput is marginal to non-existent.

Now, if you exist everywhere all over the globe, as Google does, it works. For everyone else, it’s just giving Google free space.

I wouldn’t have actually looked at this closely — in the back of my mind the little voice always said it was a scheme of trash — if the Adsense things hadn’t suddenly stopped running on the SITREP posts.

This was because Google halts them if it decides you need to update your tax information.

When I looked at the problem on my Google dashboard, this is what I discovered.

Google doesn’t pay until a $100 threshold is reached. However, long before that milestone, it will summarily badger you to keep updating your settings with verifications of phone numbers, personal identification numbers and additional tax filing information.

Anyway, in 18 months of SITREP contributions, AdSense had earned me a big $15.00.

At the rate AdSense was making money for me, it’d be a mere seven years before Google cut my first check. Laughable and worthless don’t even begin to encompass it.

This week, in the mail, a letter from Price Waterhouse, commissioned by Google, to service all their AdSense accounts with money in them, cash that is about to go into escheat to the state because it hasn’t been claimed.

PWC informed that Google had accumulated 90 dollars in AdSense revenue. But that the threshold for cutting a check was 100 dollars, which made my original estimate about never being paid almost spot on.

I could have this money, PWC said, if I checked the box on the return letter saying that I was the owner and, in addition, logged into my AdSense account to close it.

How many people do you think recall the passwords and credentials accounts they haven’t used in almost half a decade? How many, do ya think, even have the same computer?

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Did you know Google Alphabet has a company named Calico? It’s going to find the cure for old age, cancer and neuro-degenerative diseases. With less senior scientists than you’d find in one of the departments at a big university.

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