Since a good number of those scheduled to receive a check are first timers, many of you still had incomplete details. Instead of waiting for everyone, we decided to deposit the ones that were ready and will just be sending the rest in another batch of deposits.

If you have a check due, please sign in to your account and fill out the details. And to make things just a bit easier for us, send an email to team(at)blogbank.com.ph with the following details: your username, the email address you used for your BlogBank account, your complete name, and your bank details. For your bank details, be sure to include the account name if it’s not the same as your full name, along with the account number and type (savings or current/checking). And if your bank’s quite picky with the details like your account’s branch, include them too so we can make sure we get you your payment as soon as possible.

If you’ve already received the deposit and noticed that the amount is not exactly the same as that listed in the publisher app, note that there is a tax deduction as mandated by law. The deduction will likely be smaller than we’ve all expected and we will give you more details on this soon.

Topping our previous record of roughly 420,000 pesos, this batch of payments grows 25% and comes out to around 540,000 pesos. This time 9 campaigns pushed 53 bloggers to breach the 2,000–peso minimum for having a check issued.

Since I just finished updating the system with all the data and calculations, we can only start next week for all the verification and other required documentation to produce your checks. The team will be working hard to have them released at the soonest time possible, so we all have a bit more for our holiday shopping. We should have an update on your checks in the coming days.

Do sign in to your account to see if you should be expecting a check soon, and while you’re at it, be sure to complete the requirements we’ve mentioned before so your payment is released with no trouble.

Keep on blogging!

“You don’t have to be a ‘famous’ blogger to enlist. We believe in the power of ‘word-of-mouth’ and blogs can easily develop a following when they start.

Enjoy the holy week!

This is probably the biggest payment we will be releasing as one batch, the 11 ad campaigns helping 50 of our bloggers to reach the 2,000 peso mark required for the issuance of checks. As it stands now, we are set to release a gross amount around 420,000 pesos as payments for these bloggers.

Before we actually write your checks though, we need to account for taxes as required by the law. I must admit, this isn’t the fun part of the process. Depending on your financial status, each blogger/publisher will be deducted a 10% or 15% tax. If you are earning below 720,000 pesos a year, you qualify for the much lower 10% tax. You just need to send us an affidavit stating such and we’ll only deduct (and remit) 10%. We do have an affidavit template and we’ll be putting this up under your account; download, print and sign, have it notarized and send us the original copy.

If you’d rather not apply for the lower tax or if you’re earning more than 720k, let us know right away and we’ll have your check ready at the soonest time possible.

Now why are you still reading this? Go lookup your account and see if you’ve reached 2,000 pesos. You just might have reached it this time. And don’t forget to invite your friends to apply for the BlogBank.

It is now 2009, and as we prepare for our first year anniversary celebration, we are also going to issue our first batch of checks for 2009 (And yes, blog more often!).

A lot have asked how we do things —

“When do we get our checks?”

“When can we see live earnings reports?”

“is there a set payment cycle for ads served?”

To answer the first question, I must answer the third question first — when we started BlogBank, we set our sights on doing payments monthly. It turned out to be a logistical nightmare to issue checks — plus not everyone was making the P2,000.00 cut for a check to be released (that answers the first question). So we decided to do payments at least quarterly. We deposit your money to the bank accounts after deducting 10% or 15% tax (we are a local company and we pay our taxes!). If by some reason you didn’t enter your bank information in your profile page, we hunt you down through text (or usually in a blog event since we all know one another) and ask for your bank details. So please, fill in your bank details in your profile page!!!

As for the second question, this is the next thing we are working on. Markku has all your data safe and sound — it’s just not showing up live. What I love about Markku’s work is that whatever he does scales pretty well. When we launched, our first task at hand was eliminating spammed pageviews (!!!). After that was done, we enhanced our reporting tool for advertisers. Now we’re working on automated payments. A payment report in your account is generated when we issue checks. That’s how it works as of now, btu we’re improving that practice to make things more informative.

Over and above these, we were never lacking in terms of serving our clients (and especially many thanks to you guys, my blogger friends!!!!). It is comforting to me that BlogBank grows at a steady pace, and we’re introducing small features here and there, most of which you may not notice, but are important to the overall system of how we work. One thing remains consistent, and those are the clients that we service. We want to be fair to them and fair to you, and that is no easy task. Thank you for being the most patient people on earth!

To those who got tickets to the Eraserheads concert and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus because of us, I hope you all had fun!!!!

P.S. If you really do need the money and have not made your PHP 2K mark, you can always ask and we can do something about it.

First of all, please accept our apologies for being unable to send out your payments. We are very sad about this, too.

Primarily, we are having trouble with some possible taxation issues as we are effectively passing money from one company to another entity. BlogBank being a Filipino company, we have specific laws that categorize transactions we do as taxable, and this may include the payments we pass on to our bloggers. I wish I could explain things further but I’m seriously not qualified and just as clueless; as bloggers ourselves we would’ve wanted earnings be passed on to the publishers before taxes. This would’ve resulted in a similar setup to AdSense publishers where they (we) receive payments as is and settle our respective taxes on our own. Under Philippine laws though, we cannot apply a similar solution.

As a result of the legal barriers we have now, we are unable to compute the earnings for all blogs running BlogBank ads. Typically, earnings are computed by a simple formula that pegs traffic data against the total money set aside for the blogs of a given campaign. Unfortunately, the said “total money” is no longer a fixed value as it may be subject to certain taxes and similar things. We have been consulting with experts in this matter to make sure every action we take is fair and legal.

Be assured that we do have the capacity to pay and checks will be sent out as soon as we can. We are working hard to iron out the kinks to avoid possible legal troubles in the future. More updates on these matters soon.

As of now, the tool reports earnings up to the end of May. We are still processing the stats for campaigns that conclude after that date and will make them available at the soonest time we can.

Go on, check your earnings now.

We’ve sent out cheques for the month of June period that starts from the beginning of the year until May and you should be receiving them if you met the P2,000.00 mark.