Jun
Missing Adbrite Money
If you’re an Adbrite publisher like myself, you may have noticed some of your money is missing from the March Payment. Adbrite rolls on a 60 day payout period, so yes we are just now getting March’s payments.
Check the image below (click image to zoom in). Look under revenue, then payment amount.
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Notice the revenue earned is $186.28 and the check amount is for $162.65. That doesn’t look good to me. Where’s the missing $23?
At first I though it was Adbrite sticking it to us with a new fee. I did some research but couldn’t find anything on it. I decided to email them, and much to my surprise they did email me back within 24 hours. Here’s the response:
Thank you for writing in, we apologize for the delay. We have determined that you were not issued a payment because we were unable to collect payment from all your advertisers. We realize this is very inconvenient; however, it is stipulated to publishers when they first sign up that they are paid on a net-60 basis if all payments are collected on time. Once we have collected these earnings, they will be added to your next payment.
Anyone want to place bets on whether or not Adbrite ever collects my missing $23 ? I’m leaning towards no. Sounds like a scam to me. Adbrite should collect their money up front before they display someone’s ads, right?
I know of one other person this has happened to this month. If it happened to you please leave a comment so I can get an idea of if it’s common, or somewhat rare.
wow, that is really a scam.
They should collect money upfront, and if they choose not too.. they should cover the missing money for their publishers !!
This is really lame.
I didn’t like Adbrite. But that’s just a scam right there and you may need to think about changing.
That must be quite annoying. I’ve considered signing up for adbrite for one of my sites - but this has deterred me slightly.
Not really new to your blog, but new to comments. I really love your writing style. I’m quite good friends with a few good bloggers, I was wondering if you would be interested in some link exchange? My blog is http://www.randlife.com come by and check it out. I’ve subscribed to your feed, hopefully you do the same =)BTW, I can’t believe ad brite is doing this to you, usually they’re very reliable.
Keep up the good work dude!
Yep that sounds really crappy to me. I never even bother checking my Adbrite because it makes so little, but that $23 is worth complaining about. It’s not your problem they didn’t pay. You delivered the service of running those ads for them. Whether sommeone else pays Adbrite is not your concern. Only whether they pay you. Sounds like a really crappy TOS. Maybe they’ll change the way the do business if they catch enough flak from it.
Marc - I plan on emailing them back with a complaint. We’ll see what happens. I just think it’s happening to a lot of people.
Wow now if the advertisers are not paying this is something you wouldn’t expect from adbrite, being one of the more known advertising agencies. But this could easily be a scam. There is probably a cause in the TOS that says if they can’t get money from your advertisers your screwed.
Good luck and keep us posted on this…
That’s super lame! I would find out how advertisers can post an ad without pre-paying. I doubt they would be able to give you an answer.
- Mike
I had the same problem, fortunately I only lost about $4. I think its less to do with “collecting payments” and more to do with chargebacks and other frauds that get Adbrite have to dissolve. They really should make sure they have the funds though and if you’ve got 60 days to play with it is unacceptable.
http://www.venturefox.com/adbrite.jpg
[...] David Lithman – I was quite concerned when Adbrite did not pay him the right amount on his March payment. He also had a great post on what other bloggers were doing a year ago, he included me in the list! [...]
[...] A month ago when I posted about my missing Adrbite money, I really thought it was lost. Adbrite seems like a sketchy company to me at times. I mean, I’m just now receiving my April payment … and it’s July. But anyways, I checked my email this morning and saw my Adbrite payment confirmation letter. I figured “how much did they take from me this time?” [...]
My husband was just cheated out of $89.00 and some change.
We published ads on our site from Adbrite for a bit. After a few months we noticed some of the ads weren’t working correctly and once we contacted them about the issue they decided to close our account claiming click fraud and we lost more then $700 in ad revenue. They stated that we must find IP information from our website to prove that these were valid clicks. Of course we have no way of telling which IPs clicked on their ads because they have no tracking included in their service. I don’t know why they couldn’t strip out the fraudulent clicks, if there were any. Basically, we are forced to believe whatever they claim and take the loss. Rest assured, we removed their script and closed our account with them.
I’ve used Adbrite for over a year on one of my sites and then suddenly I got an email that my site couldn’t be included in their market place. I replied and complained a bit about that and then suddenly all hell broke lose. So far they have accused my site of being (new reason each time they reply!): paid-to-read, paid-to-surf, paid-to-click program, click exchange program and the last two times just plain and simple click fraud. Of course nothing of this is true and I have no way of defending my self. I told them they could have full access to my servers to check them out but they just won’t listen. I ask them to provide proof of the accusation and they refuse. The ONLY change in the site the last year was that my partner wanted to sell his part of the site to me so I registered a new Adbrite account. All traffic is genuine and mostly from good countries. oh well I only lost about $1500 and feel sorry for all those people that lost even more. A funny thing is that shortly after Adbrite terminated I got contacted by Adbrites biggest competitor Etology and they where more than happy to accept my site into their program where it still remain.
I have been a full time webmaster for 8+ years now and I usually can smell a scam a mile a way but Adbrite totally fooled me this time.