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It’s Harder To Make Money Online Outside Of North America

Posted by Paul B | February 2, 2008 .

So it looks like WidgetBucks aren’t welcoming clicks from us foreigners, it must have been a temporary glitch in the system, bugger!

Anyway, it got me onto thinking about this from a much broader angle, is it harder to make money online if you’re based outside of North America? I think it is. There are a number of reasons why I think like this but these are my top 3:-

1. Treated As 2nd Class Citizens On Ad Networks - There are a number of ad networks out there that treat us very poorly compared to Americans/Canadians. Some won’t let you sign up (regardless of where the traffic you bring them is coming from), others lower their pay outs or otherwise try to “put you off”. Even the big G is now guilty of this. I live in the UK and notice it a bit, I imagine it’s even worse if you live outside of Europe and Australia.

2. News, What News? - I have a large list of blogs that I either visit on a regular basis and/or I subscribe to their feeds. I think it’s really important to be right up with the latest developments in this game, the early adopters always seem to benefit the most from any new networks and methods of making money. The problem is that so many of the big names in make money blogging are based over the ATLAntic that for most of my day there is no news (it’s just bad luck I suppose that Darren Rowse is equally as far away). Press releases and breaking news is understandably released at a time to suite North America. Of course when something does break by the time I read about it the next morning it’s too late.

3. Exchange Rates - During December and January it actually looked for a little while like things were picking up, but no. I can’t think of any of the big ad-networks that let you earn your money in anything other than US Dollars*. When the dollar weakens we all end up taking a pay cut. I can completely understand this for many of the smaller networks but I guess the one that really bugs me is Adsense. There must be as many Adsense/Adwords users outside of the US as there are in the US? When using Adwords from the UK I pay in sterling, my bids are in sterling. Seems they can do the conversion one way but not the other because in Adsense every click earns me cents and dollars. It can look like it’s going to be a good month right up to the day when Google go to payout and then the slightest shift in the exchange rates can make a big difference to what you get in the bank.

I’m not trying to blame anyone here, some things just are what they are and aren’t likely to change anytime soon. As much as the internet is global it is still dominated by North America, I only have to look at my traffic stats to see that. I guess the real question should be are you prepared to move to make more money online? Not at the moment so I’d better stop my whinging!

* I stand corrected, somebody just pointed out CJ.

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  1. Laptop CANADA Windows Vista Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12  February 17, 2008 10:35 pm

    I agree with this post 100%. You will notice that most networks don’t even allow members who aren’t in NA. This can be terrible for some people but also great for people who live in NA as then the competition is lowered.

    Laptop’s last blog post..ClickBank Affiliates