Personally, I worry little about if they are cheating me/us/everyone, and try to concentrate on getting more traffic/clicks from my site. I can see its a problem, but there is a saying - "some people are always trying to ice-skate uphill". I think arguing with G over these clicks is, unfortunatly, a bit of a waste of time. DD
Don't forget we are working hard to create good content to place Adsense on. (well some of us are ) . My point is that we are also providing a free service to google. It is the webmasters and companies who create cntent that make Google what it is. Without us Google would be nothing. Every click we get paid for on Adsense also gets Google a profit as well. Adsense is a 50/50 partnership. Google does not have all the power here. Also, your friend who made that click, well possibly his IP is marked on some blacklist so that none of his clicks result in payment. Google Adsense is far to huge for them to do something stupid like cheat the advertiser out of their money. Something like that would ruin Google. They aren't that dumb. The bottom line is that Google and Google only know which clicks are valid and which are not. Third party software can only guess at it.
Please stop bringing this issue up. I have seen this asked many times since these adsense tracking programs came out. It is IMPOSSIBLE to track adsense accurately with ANY of the tracking code. Netscape based browsers (firefox) do NOT allow any accurate tracking to occur. They do not allow the javascript onclick method to be called for the adsense code, so tracking programs must guess at when someone clicks. Most tracking programs guess that, if you have your mouse over an ad, and you leave the page, that would be a click. This is easily a serious flaw if anyone uses keyboard shortcuts to leave a page (Alt f4 or Alt <-). Also, for internet explorer browsers, the onclick event is not as accurate as you might think. The onClick method is called if you click and release off of the ad, but you will not be taken to the ad page if this happens. There are other flaws that I don't really have time to go into right now, but basically, you can see almost everyone who clicks your ads by using a stat tracker. You also see many people who did NOT click the ads, so stat trackers overestimate clicks. Okay I'm done with my rant =P. My point was that stat trackers are not accurate.
Think about it. If we really want to scrutinize the smart pricing or the actually earning per click based on the keyword, it's actually quite easy to do that. Since we can monitor the channel in Adsense and bid for Adwords. It's pretty easy to guess how much we are earning and how much Google is earning. This leads us to one good question. Why aren't we allow to share CTR, etc? It's simple, people would just compare and guess what's behind the scene. The big question here is how much X% is Google pocketing per click?
Well, it's hard to debate on this topic. We should spend more of our time to get Adsense to work for us
I see your point but you forgot to mention that if it wasnt for us google wouldnt make any money from adsense. All those little sites out there that make $4 a day in adsense add up and i'm sure they make millions of dollars a month just from the little guys. Then there are people that make couple thousands a month...that means google makes the same from them. How much do you think google makes a month from adsense? So when people bitch that their stats are down and they're not making as much as they did before there is a reason for that. When you say "Who are we to have the right to complain about something we are getting for free in the first place?" umm yea we do have the right to complain. You are looking at this situation like google is making us publishers a favor to pay us. Well we are making them a even bigger favor. Because of publishers like us google is one of the richest companies in the world today. If you were running an advertising network like adsense wouldnt you try to get a larger cut on the clicks or would you give it to your publishers. Well maybe at first you would to give more to publishers but couple years later when you have millions of publishers running your ads you can do pretty much anything you want. Unless you find something that pays more per click you are going to continue running adsense on your sites even though you dont like your revenue. But what can you do? pretty much nothing! We will never know what the cut is. Is it 50/50? probably not. It might be changing every month, we might never know.
Well, if you want stats, let's take a simple example. http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/page2.html. The screenshot might just be a ficticious example but it does reveal something. Now, this time google made this screen shot, NOT ME! Though the numbers are not clear, let's assume its 20,885 Clicks earning $3,884.39, it's an average of $0.19 per click. Guess what, we are probably getting much lesser than $0.19 per click now. That's why we are bitching about this. If everyone has the same trend, then likelihood Google is slashing off the publishers' earning!
I believe that google makes continuous adjustments to earning calculations as per visitor country, how many clicks on the ad from the same person, if there is a doubt of an invalid click, etc. So, it is normal not to see the exact clicks on your account. And I think this is fair because this is their business and they are much more capable, from you and me, of handling it in order to: 1. save the interests of advertisers, 2. earn money for themselves and 3. reward us.
Now the question is what % are we sharing the profits now. If google keeps paying poorly for sites that actually generate good traffic with good content, they are going to lose a whole lot of publishers like us who will turn to other alternatives that pay us better!
If they say it is 50/50, then it is 50/50. Don't you think that they suffer the same loss we do when they lower the click earning and ignore some clicks?
In the first place, no one is sure if Google really ignores the clicks. To the publishers, it's registered as invalid clicks or non-payable clicks but to Advertisers, it's totally transparent. Advertisers would not even know if those are invalid but they will have to pay for it. Every Adword user is complaining that the bid has gone up for any keyword compared to the past but the Adsense publishers are complaining they are paid lesser than ever. Do you smell something fishy? Where's the difference of that revenue? Ahem!
I tend to agree with you as I find that the clicks shown in Adsense account is different from those in Google Analytics. Strange!