Spirit Of Salt

It was never an issue here on Spirit of Salt, but I had made the minimalistic effort to “monetize” many of my other writings (ha ha) with the ubiquitous Google Adsense text advertisement.  I have not paid much attention to this business other than to very occasionally monitor the glacial accumulation of a laughable amount of money.  I have never been completely at ease with this decision simply for the fact that I exercise no control over what advertisements appear on my sites, which conflict I glossed with an uneasy internal nod towards caveat emptor.

I am not the first person to speculate how much of other people’s money Google has earning interest in the bank based on their AdSense payout policy, which is, in a nutshell, that you can wait until you rack up a hundred bucks for them to pay out, or else you can cancel your AdSense account and get a one-time payout and stop earning money from Google.  I don’t imagine that Google is telling.  As arriving at a theoretical figure would involve coming up with statistics on optimism as well as relative failure rates for would-be commercial writers, the world, as the saying goes, may never know.

Anyway, I just got an email from Google about how I needed to agree to the new terms and services so off I went to check that out.  Now this is the internet and I’ve agreed to a lot of stuff I haven’t read, but some verbiage in the email regarding my needing to develop a privacy policy (strange, thinks I, since I don’t collect any personal information on any of my websites) so I took a closer look.  Here’s a little preview on what sorts of value added services Google may be offering to visitors to your AdSense-enabled website:

“You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website.  Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.”

As far as signing people up for being tracked goes, that’s a little broad for my taste.  So I’m shutting down AdSense on the rest of my sites and then we’ll see how hard it is to get slightly less than $16 out of Google.  If I ever decide to strive once again to write something popular online, I think I’ll attempt to monetize it by the time-honored method of seeking private advertisers, rather than contributing anything more to Google’s Great Internet Money Sifter.