ddent - 1:41 am on May 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

To the person crying that he's "out" 600 dollars because of this mix up. You got paid roughly $4400 ,and you're short 600, and you're still complaining? You and mister Greedy here should hook up sometimes.

I'm not convinced that expecting Google to hold up its end of the bargain is greed. Google does not run this program out of charity. It is simply a deal where often both sides are reported as being happy - the best kind of deal. It is not unreasonable to get upset when trust is broken by one side not doing what it said it would. A reason people might have for working with Google as opposed to a smaller PPC provider is the reduced credit risk from working with a large publically traded company with lots of liquidity. People may have made commitments to others based on a high expectation of timely payment from Google.

In fairness to Google they appear to be dealing with this as best they can now that it has happened, and it is the first payment problem I can think of having experienced since their glitch in October 2003 (for which, IIRC, they apologized with a token gesture of making the next payment early). However, I still find it alarming that an error of this magnitude could happen - are there no sanity checks in place? It was obvious from one glance at my payment exactly what had happened.