Short of cash: Are payday loans a good thing?

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Ever been a bit short of cash? I know I have: perhaps the rent is due tomorrow, but you don’t have it! Your insurance premium is due… Some bills are due. There is always one bill to be paid, regardless of the fact that you just paid the previous one!

One possible solution is Personal Cash Advance, a company that provides payday loans (or cash advances) for customers facing such short term cash flow problems. So what is a payday loan? Briefly, it’s a short term loan that is intended to provide applicants with a short term financing typically between $100 to $1500, until their next pay check arrives.

Such financing can be used in emergencies to cover unexpected costs and allow customers to avoid penalties for such costs as bounced checks and late payment fees. The term of such loans is usually two weeks. Customers choose payday advances to cover small, unexpected expenses while avoiding costly bounced-check fees and late payment penalties. With Personal Cash Advance you can apply for a payday loan online and have your advance electronically deposited to your checking or savings account.

For example, if your car has a break down, and you need it to be repaired to get to work, you may wish to use a small payday advance loan to avoid overcharging your credit card (perhaps the repairshop doesn’t accept credit cards!). Naturally, there are fees that are incurred before taking out such payday loans, so if you think it is likely that you will need a payday loan, it’s wise to invest a little time reading the terms of the loans BEFORE you need to.

A little research in this area before emergencies can help borrowers to decide quickly on effective solutions, rather than simply signing on the dotted line with no idea what’s in the terms of the agreement or the APR. And make sure you understand what the charges are, how much they are, and when the installments are due! Payday Loans aren’t without their problems, though. If you find that you are borrowing such loans on a revolving or frequent basis, you may need to look at why this is the case. They may in fact be making things worse, not better.

So, research, consider and decide responsibly to avoid unnecessary problems, and Payday Loans should be fine. How do you handle cash flow issues? If you’re short of cash one month, what do you do? How do you deal with the situation? Is it recurring?

Could Google be cheating its advertisers?

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This is an interesting story about how Google is trying to handle Click Fraud. I’ve included a good quotation or two from the story below. Naturally, I’m pleased that Google is trying to crack click fraud.

PC World – Google Opens Click-Fraud Site

Google Inc. has unveiled a Web site “resource center” focused on the thorny issue of click fraud, which many consider a potential threat to the company’s main source of revenue: pay-per-click advertising.Google developed the new Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center primarily to give its advertisers a single place to find Google’s information about click fraud, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust and safety at Google, on Friday.

You can visit Google’s Click Fraud Center here.

However, some of the implications here are quite startling (emphasis mine)

“At a basic level, we protect advertisers against click fraud by not charging for suspicious clicks. The intent of a click is difficult to determine with a high degree of scientific accuracy. We therefore create a high false positive rate by marking a much larger number of clicks as invalid compared to the number of clicks we believe to be generated with bad intent.”

“Undoubtedly, there will be some instances of click fraud which will go undetected by our proactive systems and processes. By casting the net of invalid clicks wide enough, however, we are able to effectively minimize that proportion.”

So we have to ask: Could Google be screwing its legitimate publishers?

clickfraud

There are likely a number of ways that this could be the case:

  • False positives mean exactly – the clicks were genuine but because of Google’s algorhithms they were in fact identified as fraudulent. Naturally, the advertisers benefit because they get visitors to their websites for free.

  • The number of legitimate websites and blogs now accused of click fraud is getting longer and longer: including Kumiko Suzuki’s blog, LegalAndrew (reinstated), etc.

  • The lack of external assessment and objective rulings, indeed even the lack of transparency, all suggest that there are HUGE problems with the way Google is handling “click fraud” from the point of view of the smaller publishers.

  • Rates are declining anyway for clicks, in some cases a click generates only 1c or 2c. Though over 100,000 impressions, this could be a generous $50! If you’re generating that number of impressions per month, you’ve probably got decent traffic.

So it’s no wonder, as John Chow has done, that bloggers are beginning to ditch Adsense for other revenue streams that are less stressful: sponsored reviews, affiliate linking, text linking, etc., to name but a few. IN fact, it’s not a good idea to put your entire stock in Google Adsense! In fact, this month, John Chow entirely ditched Adsense because of its poor performance on his blog.

Further Reading:

The nonsense about AdSense: The Times Online.
Banned from Google Adsense – Lost $200,000

How are you monetizing your blog? Have you had problems with Adsense fraud? Do you even bother with Adsense? Let’s hear it!

Disclaimer: InvestorBlogger does use Adsense in this website, but is seriously considering removing it.

Starting Up: Again – reviving an old blog…

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I’ve been blogging for more than a few years… But with one thing and another, it hasn’t been a regular activity of mine … not until about November of last year.

I recently had an old blog that had been redundant at a subdomain of this one. So I decided to revive that blog, by giving it its own URL and starting up the blog again on a regular basis. It’s kind of like a new blog in some ways, so I was thinking about blogging about how to set one up on this blog, but using that blog as an example.

So I’ll be starting a regular course, once or twice a week to bring new people into blogging. If you do like the course, subscribe to the blog, which you can do at the top of the page! I’m anticipating a series of about 30 posts, so do check back. Lesson one is tomorrow!