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Google Ad Pittance Costs Jobless Blogger Unemployment Benefits
By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 8, 2009
Modified Oct 8, 2009
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By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 8, 2009
Modified Oct 8, 2009
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Six months into her job at an NYC law firm, a woman who would only identify herself as "Karin" was terminated. She relocated to St. Louis, Mo., and began studying for the bar exam while staying busy with a food blog, STL Meal Deals. Money was tight; she was living on $405 a week from unemployment benefits from New York, so she thought she'd try generating a little side money by signing up for Google AdSense, which pays bloggers to host ads on their sites and sends checks when their earnings hit $100. It was a pittance that would cost her dearly.
After three months, Karin finally got enough clicks on the ads to get a fat $100 check from Google. And for some reason, she felt an ethical responsibility to report her AdSense income to the Man. And so her Kafkaesque nightmare began, with the Department of Labor cutting her weekly benefits to $300 and sending her a form to fill out and send to her employer. As she soon learned, the unemployment bureaucracy has not yet figured out how to classify such income derived from "teh internets."
Her endless back-and-forth with the DOL yielded a laughable number of conflicting instructions; at one point a state official told her she needed to declare that she was working every time she updated her blog. Finally, the state finally decided to investigate her, and she's been declared ineligible for unemployment benefits while the investigation is ongoing! Karin tells Forbes, "It's frustrating that nobody seems to have a straightforward answer. It's even more frustrating that trying to work and generate additional income, while being straightforward and honest about that income, is treated with suspicion and punished."
Tagged
benefit
blogging
google adsense
lawyer
Unemployment
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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