It would be good to get a clear citation of this, if available.
Not that this matters as much, but I'd like to point out that even if this is the case that the money is returned to advertisers, Google may still reap non-trivial benefits from this chain of events in at least these ways.
> Depending on the amount and length of time the money is held, this might add up to a substantial dollar value in interest payments they're making by holding onto the cash. The interest generated by temporarily holding $80 here and $400 there times thousands and thousands of users, held for a while, could be a non-trivial amount of cash in a long timeframe.
> Google simultaneously screws over advertisers (garbage and/or fraud clicks) at the same time as they sometimes give away these freebie clicks (unpaid kids' clicks) back to their advertisers. Now think about advertisers' perceptions of Google for their business. It can be argued that Google is essentially banking on the goodwill from the kids' ad clicks being returned (giving the advertisers a freebie) to makeup for however much they piss off advertisers for the garbage fraud clicks that they receive. If Google can bank on "stealing" some percentage of clicks constantly, that might be enough for them to partially make up just enough for the bad clicks they send their advertisers. That could arguably materially impact their business prospects.
Not that this matters as much, but I'd like to point out that even if this is the case that the money is returned to advertisers, Google may still reap non-trivial benefits from this chain of events in at least these ways.
> Depending on the amount and length of time the money is held, this might add up to a substantial dollar value in interest payments they're making by holding onto the cash. The interest generated by temporarily holding $80 here and $400 there times thousands and thousands of users, held for a while, could be a non-trivial amount of cash in a long timeframe.
> Google simultaneously screws over advertisers (garbage and/or fraud clicks) at the same time as they sometimes give away these freebie clicks (unpaid kids' clicks) back to their advertisers. Now think about advertisers' perceptions of Google for their business. It can be argued that Google is essentially banking on the goodwill from the kids' ad clicks being returned (giving the advertisers a freebie) to makeup for however much they piss off advertisers for the garbage fraud clicks that they receive. If Google can bank on "stealing" some percentage of clicks constantly, that might be enough for them to partially make up just enough for the bad clicks they send their advertisers. That could arguably materially impact their business prospects.