Transferring Adsense Accounts

Changing from Personal to Business

[Mr_Fern]

Next year I plan to formulate an LLC business (I have not determined when exactly as I'm still working on a business plan), which will ultimately take over ownership of my website and will be the owner of my future websites. Since it will be the company that owns the sites, all advertisement programs will be registered under the company.

Does Google provide for the ability to transfer an Adsense account from an individual to a company? Or would I have to re-register under the company?

[Zygoot]

[google.com...] :)

[TheDonster]

I contacted the AS team about this very topic since I was planning on doing the same thing. They replied the only way to transfer your account is to close the personal account and then re-apply with the company name. There were no exceptions since this was to avoid problems when webmasters sell sites with AdSense on them. However, they did mention that if requested, the checks could be made out to a company name if I so desired, thereby eliminating the need to close and re-open the accounts. In the end, I'm only incorporating in early 2006 so I decided to keep the account under my name for now. Once the company is set up, I will use electronic transfer solely to the business account. Then you just declare however you see fit regarding your business bank account. As I'm in Canada, the IRS doesn't apply to CDN owners so you should check with your accountant to be sure in any case.

[erobs]

I recently had to do something similar after selling a company that my adsense account was listed under.

I contacted Google and received a similar letter about canceling and reopening. The rep that talked to did offer to expedite the approval of my new account and get the new account to me as soon as possible. I think the time between canceling the old account, per an email to the rep, and getting my new account approved and information to me was about 2-3 hours.

[davidof]

The other thing is if you move country - Adsense can't cope with that and you have to close and reopen your account. Worth thinking about especially if you have two domiciles.

[Mr_Fern]

Thanks for all the answers everyone.

[sailorjwd]

Fern,

It may depend on how much revenue you are making for them.

Last feb I wanted to switch to a business account. They allowed me to apply for the new business account (which was approved within the a couple of hours) and then change the code on the website to the new account over an extended period of time. I still have both accounts open.

Also, I was still receiving clicks (and revenue) on the old account 6 months after removing the code because of cached pages.