One of the nice things about not having much money is not having to worry about what might happen to it. Sliding stock markets, a poor exchange rate – who cares? Unless, of course, you have something tied up in investments, or are an AdSense publisher who doesn’t live in America.
Google is often able to pay publishers in their choice of the American dollar or a local currency. Yet that second option is based on the exchange rate, and as an article in the Guardian Unlimited reported, “The dollar edged lower against the euro and a basket of major currencies on Monday as renewed credit market worries reinforced expectations that more Federal Reserve interest rate cuts are imminent.”
So in a very real sense, the tanking U.S. economy is causing publishers to receive less and less money. And this is having a very real effect; although some people use the money as extra income, others depend on it to support themselves.
Betsy Schiffman uncovered a whole thread’s worth of folks who have, one way or the other, been affected by the dollar’s fall and AdSense. Also, a full month ago (before many of these problems became worse), Everton Blair wrote, “If I do ever quit my day job and use [the] blog earnings to put food on the table, I might have to move back to America.”
This trend will definitely bear watching, although there’s probably little that the publishers, Google, or anybody else can do about it.
