Seems this smart pricing has gotten out of hand. Google has a business model and business partners (publishers) that have agreed to their TOS. fine. I suspect that the Google business model, is that part of the income or better said, the amount per click charged the advertiser will be divied up between the publishers site where the click ocurred and Google. fine! I suspect Google always charges an advertiser for clicks. I havent heard of an Adsense free advertising campaign. so the question is: How is it that 3 clicks can amount to .02? sounds like a breach of contract to me. your thoughts?
They pay a few cents a click and you get less than 1 cent. That is why it is called smart pricing they get your traffic for very little cost at all.
One or two of those clicks could have been deemed invalid. 1 cent per click is not unheard of. It depends on the quality of your traffic, country of where the click originated from, and the specific keyword. Forget about a class action suit against google. First, you have no proof of anything wrong. Second, very few, if any, law firms are going to go up against google and their billions of dollars unless you are willing to foot the legal bill - which would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum. If you don't like their program, you don't have to use it. Google's pubic financials show they pay out an average of about 78.5% of what they take in per click. That would be 2 cents to the publisher on three 1 cent valid clicks (rounded down).
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33230&topic=8820 If the advertisers price the click at 1cent, it is unlikely that Google can pay you more than that. Google would indeed need to take their cut from it. In the end, since you do not know which are the advertisers have been clicked and how much the ads really cost, it is different to launch a class action against google. Besides, it is not like all advertisers would price their ads at high rates and even if they do, visitors to your sites are given the freedom to click whichever ads which interests them and not the ones which are more costly to the advertisers.
Google Adsense is basically a willing buyer willing seller market, IMHO it would be too litigious to bring out a class action against Google based on your reasoning. Also for a breach of contract you need to clearly define the breach, but I don't see any breach from the posting.
I agree with the statements above. Smart pricing has to do with the conversion rate of your site. First, can you even prove that you are being smartpriced? Second, if you are the likely cause is that your site does not convert well. They will not put high value ads on a site that does not convert well. If they did, advertisers would not be willing to pay nearly as much or might even leave the program.