Google Adsense French frustration, $Dollar to €Euro exchange rate

Sony made fool of us with its Playstation 3 selling at $600 in the US and €600 in Europe and Nintendo did the same with the Wii. With an exchange rate of around 0,734 : 1, that means the real price of the Playstation 3 in Europe is €440,4 ! Now this was ok for me because I love playing video games and I was the first to buy the wii in France.

Now French people also try to monetize their websites and blogs on the Internet. Unfortunately there is no equivalent to the efficiency of Google Adsense in the world. That means a French blogger monetized by Adsense (and other American advertising company) is losing 36,4% compared to its American fellow. This is really unfair for someone who live in Europe and particularly in France.

So what can we do ? Create a french Google like company with an Adsense equivalent program? Ok that could be a solution but not the easiest one. We could also wait for the dollar to be a real money again but this is not really a solution in the short term. So the solution would be to hold the Adsense payments until the dollar raises again but unfortunately economists don’t see this scenario currently. Believe me, this is really frustrating.

I see that you’re not convinced. So let’s take a popular blog and its revenue:

http://www.johnchow.com/make-money-on-the-internet-april-2007.

On this popular blog you can see that John chow made $11,702.66 on April 2007. So now let’s suppose my blog was earning this amount, then for my level of living in France that would be worth €8589,75 !! That makes a huge difference, doesn’t it ? You have to be aware that products are sold $1=€1 in stores if you take similar products in France and the US.

The strange thing comes when you buy some Adwords. You pay in Euros while Americans pay in dollar. We don’t really how google calculates all this. It seems like Google is playing on both sides. Paying less in Euros on Adsense but receiving more money in Euros as well through Adwords. Anyone has more information on this aspect ??

I remember the time when Google was paying foreigners like me in dollars with a check. So I received at first like $100 by check. As I’m French I had to go to the bank and ask for it in euros. They charged me 15 euros for the foreign check plus a commission for the exchange. And of course the exchange rate was better than now but still high. So the current situation is better in the way that now payment is done directly on the bank account in euros but the exchange rate has increased in favor of the euro currency.

Anyway there is a good side of the coin. A nice advantage is that if we want to get reviewed by a famous American blog, it’s something like “buy 2 get 1 free !”.

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