This article came up on the ever-sporadic Google Africa blog. Basically, those business owners who want to geographically target their AdWords in Kenya and South Africa can now do so. It's good news, although when it comes to Kenya, we'll see how it works out as the satellite connections they use to a large extent are notoriously hard to track location on due to the identifying land IP they get being the one where the connection touches down. So, if the satellite link you're on touches down in England, you appear to be from England, even though you're actually in Nairobi. Obviously this will change a great deal with the new cable lighting up, but for the time being, it's an issue that I'm rather curious about as it completely cripples this new system how I see it.

The other thing that I'm vastly mystified about is that there is no mention of how people from Africa are to either pay for AdWords or for content publishers to be paid for AdSense displays. As I've mentioned before, Google has no practical payment set up for anywhere in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. I've looked over the Adsense blog to see if I missed some recent announcement, but nothing pops out. Surely it would make sense to have a blogger writing in Nairobi who talks about some new restaurant that just opened up to get paid AdSense revenue if the owner of that restaurant wants to use AdWords to promote it next to the article about it. That's how the model works in the rest of the world and it seems logical to me they'd want to continue it here. While it sucks to criticize new innovation in Africa, there seems to be a tremendous disconnect here that is really not helping out anyone and I'm really hoping that I'm daft to something awesome that's happened recently.

I remember the scene at the end of Back to the Future II where, just after watching Doc Brown getting blown up by lighting, Marty McFly stands there in the rain, not knowing what to do next. A car pulls up and a strange man gets out to deliver a telegram from 1885 to Marty in 1955. Of course, that scene was brought to us by the Western Union man. What an incredible point of branding that was in 1989 when the movie was shot, by inferring that your messages will get delivered even if it needs to be 60 years in the future.

Now of course, I curse the graves of the founders of Western Union anytime I need to pay someone for work who lives in Africa. With their telegram operations shelved 162 years after they were founded, 17 years after that scene in Back to the Future II was shot, and some 10 years after widespread adoption of the internet and email, one wonders how many more years before they shutter completely? Given the rate of contraction, I'm thinking maybe four years or so. Because it's really money transfers that are keeping that company alive now and I don't know what the exact statistics are, but it seems like the bulk of them are to Africa.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that there is actually some sort of mechanism that allow me to transfer money around the world in mere minutes to pay someone, but the prices they charge are ludicrous. I'm sure everyone has their own story, but I just spent $8 to send $25. That's a 30% surcharge. It's an impressive way to make money (although SMS charges still beat it) but it simply can't last forever.

I was reading about launch of Zap International by Zain mobile. They're just one more player in what's bound to be a very crowded field soon of transferring money via the mobile phone. On a certain level, it's pretty impressive to have this kind of flexibility. On another, it terrifies me to a large extent that at some point in the very near future, if not now, your communications network will also be holding your money. I don't like that. It's too much wrapped up in to one entity and from where I'm sitting, there is a large "black hole" element to the operation that isn't transparent. While I despise the charges from Western Union, at least I know what they are and they're not a bank. But then again, their charges and inflexibility are part of the reason why so many people are gladly turning to mobile payments.

I honestly don't see the future being in mobile payments completely. It will definitely grow and be an aspect to our daily lives around the world and a mobile operator with have to offer mobile payments if they want to maintain their customer base. I see it as a feature set that is tied in more to regular old banks than to the mobile operator. They and their phones work more like a credit card terminal than anything else. And that's the real solution, having proper banks that are accountable to a great number of countries and regulatory bodies handling our money. Africa definitely needs more of this. How does Western Union fit in to that? I don't think they do.

Bloggers and website owners in Africa are getting taste of a new scam. Naturally, it's probably not originally created to be a scam, but it's turned in to that for those in Africa who use Google AdSense. For those unfamiliar with the term, AdSense is a program that people can enroll in to get a snippet of code to place on their site. Google then scans the content of pages the code is placed on, displays relevant text ads, and the website owner gets a small payment for each ad click-through. Overall it works quite well. I use it on a few websites of mine and make enough money to pay for the basic costs of the sites. I'm not getting rich on it, but I don't have to do anything to earn the money, so that's a win-win.

People with larger sites that get more traffic can make a great deal more though. This being the case, a number of website owners in Sub-Saharan Africa have taken to using Google AdSense on their sites. Again, it works well overall and they appear to get a good number of click-throughs which result in some pretty decent earnings for these guys. The problem comes when they want to actually get at the money coming to them from Google.

The quite excellent Atelier des médias, a ning network based on a radio show in French (ning doesn't like Google Translate by the way) broke the story about what has been happening to a lot of these guys with the checks that they get sent from Google. For those running AdSense, you may be asking right now, "They mail the checks? Really? But Google just does a direct deposit in to my bank account. The check is a last resort" Yes, they do direct bank deposits when you're not in Africa. This is explained a bit more in the article:

Google does not offer the possibility of electronic transfer to its customers residing in Africa and they only offer the sole option of receiving their payment by check, a check they have the greatest difficulty in cashing.

But there is an added layer of trouble to even starting a Google AdSense account in the first place as Serigne Diagne, the fellow who is the main subject of the article and owner of senactu (a Senegalese new portal), mentions in a comment which appears to single Africa out as a "problem" region:

...google only accepts payment by check for a person who is in Africa, for people who open the adsense account in Europe, America or Asia...

I have to admire the fact that Serigne is able to comment so evenhandedly on this as he has received good payments from Google that he cannot access as the article stated:

Serigne is quite angry because his site, senactu.com displays advertisements from Google (via AdSense) and has received two checks in the amount of $208.84 and $233.55 [USD]. The two checks are from CityBank, that banks located in the Dakar will not cash, not even at the local branch of CityBank.

And you can go on to see similar stories in the comments from prominent African bloggers that are in agreement with the article. I just have to ask, what gives? First off, why checks by mail? In general, postal systems around the world are not known for always being that great. When mailing to Croatia, I tell people, "Okay, I sent it in January, you should see it in February." to which they always reply, "Fine, but which year?" African postal systems can work in their roundabout way, but at the same time, there is no need for this. Why no direct bank transfers like website owners in the Americas, Europe, or Asia can access? That would seem to be the easiest option. Or, barring that, how about phone credits? This is a highly-used form of complementary currency in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's almost like Google doesn't want the payments to be received...

Let's face it, while Google is making strides to have a presence on Africa, they're a bit timid. They don't really want to invest themselves wholeheartedly, but at the same time, they want it known that they're there. They're fine with their AdSense being displayed on African sites, but how many AdWords (the other, paying-to-Google side of AdSense) clients are they going to have there? Most likely, the clients are based in France or Belgium as shown by some of the ads that I clicked on senactu. Is the mighty Google with their secret sauce afraid that they'll get taken in some African scam? Is Google really working to develop a web economy in Africa? Why do their Western Union payments not include anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa? Does Google really want to pay these African website operators or just take the AdWords client money without paying the AdSense money? From where I'm sitting, it would appear that they don't and it's a nasty scam to those who started using AdSense in good faith. Hopefully others will chime in on this and show some proof to the contrary.