Fascinating post at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type, about the Google AdSense program for putting targeted ads on your webpage and earning money back from clicks. (There is, of course, an AdSense blog.) According to Carr, “[i]t sounds totally win-win, but there’s a catch: Google doesn’t pay you until your AdSense balance goes over $100. That’s nothing for the relatively small number of big sites that make serious AdSense dough, but it’s actually a big hurdle for most AdSense members, who may only make a few cents or a few dollars a week.” The positive for Google? A kind of float. Let’s call it hyperfloat, or the long float. As they say, read the whole thing.
We had a minimum redemption amount at Epinions too. It had the benefit of providing a type of float, but the main purpose was to reduce transactions costs. Allowing redemptions of, say, $10 could cost nearly as much as the amount we were redeeming. Eric.
Eric,
The transaction cost point is a great one. I’m guessing that the break even point is much closer to $10 than $100 (the apparent Google AdSense minimum).
Joe
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