News · 2026-08-22 · 6 min
Half the ad dollar, never more than the pool
BDC is not a promise to mint money. It is half of what the dashboard actually paid, split with people who stayed active.
Listener share only works if the site cannot pay out more than advertising brought in. The rule on Wave is simple: paste the period’s estimated earnings and impressions from AdSense or the current network. eCPM is earnings divided by impressions times one thousand. Users receive fifty percent of those earnings. Wave keeps the other fifty. That user half is the pool. Nothing in the wallet is allowed to invent a number above that pool.
A browser can count a thousand local banner views. That count is not Google’s count. Paying from the local counter is how a small site goes broke in a week. So the wallet stays at zero until an operator saves a real dashboard report. After that, a device can show an estimate, but the estimate is clamped to the period pool. If you are settling BDC, you settle the pool — not a spreadsheet of every click this laptop recorded.
How to read a report
Open AdSense Reports. Pick the same dates you want to pay. Copy estimated earnings and impressions. Ignore the eCPM column if you want; we recompute it so the math is one formula everywhere. HighRevenueFormat’s June sample ($11.13 on 2,659 impressions) is history, not a live rate. Do not pay August listeners from a June demo.
What fifty percent is for
The keep is not a hidden fee on top. It is how the site pays the bills that make the banners exist: hosting, lookups, and the time to write pages Google will actually review. The share is the product pitch to listeners. Both numbers have to be true on the same day or the pitch is a coupon we cannot honor.