Revenue sharing and the TOS

Alternating your AdSense client number with contributors' numbers

[m0nty]

I'm in the late stages of creating a Web site which will host user-generated content in the form of text articles and uploaded images. To help encourage people to contribute, I'm considering a revenue-sharing agreement whereby contributors can store their AdSense client number in our database so that on the pages where their content appears, X% of the time my client number gets inserted into the AdSense code and Y% of the time theirs gets included (probably 50/50).

I've had a look back over the TOS and couldn't find anything which would specifically prohibit this. Does this sound like something Google would put the kibosh on? I could imagine that it might cause issues if contributors start madly clicking ads on their own content.

[Hobbs]

brilliant idea m0nty, but as you mentioned, your whole site will be at the mercy of contributors behavior. I cannot see Google approving of it, also it is tied to Google's acceptance of each of your contributors and giving them their own unique ID, which is unlikely if they don't have their own separate web sites.
What I would do it setup channels for each one of the contributors, and using your CMS assign a template to each contributor containing their channel ID, this way you should be able to split the earnings any way you like.

[anthrt]

they do this over at the digital point forums (why is there a word filter on that?)

[m0nty]

Hobbs: The way I'd do it is I would only accept existing Google client IDs. Posting to my site wouldn't automatically generate a new ID for you. You would have had to apply to Google to get one yourself beforehand and then enter it into our database. For those without Google client IDs, I'd have my ID on the ads 100% of the time, of course.

anthrt: Thanks for that, they seem to have it worked out already. I was interested in viewing DP's page on their policy, specifically their rule about not serving ads with a user's AdSense ID to the user who wrote the article - a good tip! Although of course that still wouldn't stop informal link exchanges where buddies click on ads in each others' articles... but that's not specifically a problem of the revenue sharing system, it's prevalent everywhere and Google has presumably built up code to detect it.

[m0nty]

Ah, I see someone asked Google about this:

forums.digital point.com/showthread.php?t=1758

(delete space)

[Jalinder]

Word filter on #*$!?