Maximizing ad revenue

How to maximize revenue for our online business

[Walnut]

I have a question about good accounting when it comes to reporting revenue:

My company runs several web sites. Most of our revenue comes from a 3rd party ad network, let's call it Ad123, that sells our ad inventory to advertisers. For that service they charge a fee.

This is how it works:

-An advertiser want's to buy advertising on our website. The advertiser contacts Ad123, who places the ad on our web site, and charges the advertiser.
-Ad123 takes out their commission of the purchase price and sends us a check for the remaining amount.

Currently we only report as revenue the amount Ad123 sends us. We never actually receive any documentation for the gross amount the advertiser pays, put we can calculate this since we know the fee Ad123 charges. My question is: Are we allowed to report the whole amount the advertiser pays to Ad123 as revenue and then post Ad123's fee as an expence?

If anybody have any input on this I would really appreciate it.

[diamondgrl]

In the United States, it would not be allowed for a major public company to count revenue that way. For revenue to count, it must be "at risk". If you are not touching that revenue, you couldn't count it. This was the general principal that was violated by many of the dot coms during the bubble years and was only discovered when the bubble burst.

Now accounting is a subjective thing so other places might have different rules, but you can do a little thought experiment: Since Google's Adsense program does not reveal how much the original ad revenue is, if you're required to count their share in the ads as revenue and they don't tell you, should you guess at what it is? Clearly not.