Publisher Terms

1Who agrees to what

These terms are an agreement between you, the person or business that creates a publisher account, and VisionForgeX (“VisionForgeX”, “we”).

• You accept them by ticking the box when you create your account. No account is created without that tick.
• Each time you log in, and for as long as our tag is on one of your sites, you continue to accept the version in force at that time.
• If you create the account for a company, you confirm that you are allowed to accept these terms for it.
• You must be at least 18 years old.

Your commercial terms (revenue share, payment schedule, minimum payout and payment method) are agreed separately with your account manager and are part of this agreement. See section 11.

2Your account

• Give us accurate information and keep it up to date, especially your email address and payment details.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for everything done through your account.
• One account for each publisher, unless we agree otherwise. You may not open a new account after we have closed one.
• We may ask for proof of who you are, or that you own or control a site, before or after it goes live.
• We will contact you by email, and by WhatsApp if you gave us a number, about your account, your sites and your payments.

3Your sites and our review

• Add only sites that you own, or that you have written permission to earn ad revenue from.
• A person on our team reviews every site before it serves a single ad. We may refuse a site, and we may remove a site later, at our discretion and without having to give a reason.
• Google must also approve your site, and so must our Google partner where one is involved. Neither you nor we control their decision or how long it takes.
• Our approval is not a statement that your site follows the rules. Keeping it within the rules stays your responsibility every day it serves ads.
• Tell us before a site changes owner, moves to a new domain, changes what it publishes, or starts getting traffic from a new paid source.

4What we do on your site

You paste our tag into your site once. From then on, following the settings in your dashboard, the tag:

• finds room for ads on each page and opens ad slots there;
• requests ads from Google Ad Exchange and from any other demand switched on for your site: Prebid bidders, OpenRTB partners and your own AdSense unit as a fallback;
• shows the formats switched on for your site: banner, anchor, interstitial, rewarded and native;
• labels in-page ads as advertisements and refreshes a slot only after it has been seen, within set limits.

You agree that:

• we may update the tag at any time, without notice, to improve it, fix it or keep it within Google’s rules;
• we may test a change of layout on part of your visitors. A person on our team approves a change before it is kept. You can ask us to stop testing on your site;
• we do not choose the individual ads. Google, the other buyers and their advertisers do. If you object to an ad, tell us and we will do what the buyer allows;
• we may add, change or remove features, and we may pause the service on a site to protect it, you or us.

You may not change, copy or take apart the tag, use it on a site we have not approved, or place it where ads are not allowed: pages with no real content, error pages, login pages, pop-ups, emails, apps or software.

5What we can see, and the data we handle

This section lists everything we have access to. If it is not listed here, we do not have it.

What we cannot see or touch. We have no access to your server, your hosting, your CMS or its admin area, your database, your files or your email. The tag does not read what visitors type into forms, and it does not read their accounts, passwords or payment details on your site.

Who else receives data. Google and the other ad buyers switched on for your site, our Google MCM partner where one is involved, the payment provider that pays you, the AI service named above, and the companies that host our servers and deliver our files. We share data with authorities only where the law requires it. We do not sell your data or your visitors’ data.

How long we keep it. For as long as your account is open, and afterwards for as long as we need it for accounts, tax and disputes.

6Your Google Ad Manager account and MCM

• To sell through Google Ad Exchange, you either connect your own Google Ad Manager account by adding our service account as a user, or you accept a Google MCM invitation sent by us or by our Google partner. MCM has two forms, Manage Account and Manage Inventory, and we will tell you which one applies to you.
• You authorise us to create and manage the ad units, orders, line items and key-values your sites need.
• Google’s own terms and policies apply to you directly. You must accept them and keep to them. Google may approve, refuse, limit or disable an account or a site at its own discretion, and we cannot overrule Google.
• Under Manage Inventory, your inventory is sold through the parent network and Google pays the parent, not you. Your earnings are then paid to you under section 11.
• You must publish the ads.txt lines we give you and keep them in place. If lines are missing or wrong, buyers may stop buying your space. Revenue lost that way is not our responsibility.
• You may remove our access at any time. Ads then stop, and what you have earned up to that point is handled under sections 10 and 11.

7Content you may not earn from

The Google Publisher Policies and Google Publisher Restrictions apply to your sites as if they were written out here, in the version current on any given day. Google changes them, and keeping up with them is your responsibility. In particular you may not run our tag on pages that contain or promote:

• anything illegal where it is published or where it is read;
• adult or sexual content, or content that sexualises or endangers children;
• hate, harassment, threats, graphic violence or shocking content;
• content you do not have the rights to: pirated films, music, software, books or streams, or text and images copied from others;
• malware, phishing, scams, misleading claims or pages built to deceive;
• gambling, drugs, weapons, tobacco or alcohol where Google or the law restricts them;
• pages with little or no content of their own: scraped, auto-generated or copied pages, or pages with more ads than content;
• content made mainly for children under 13, unless we have agreed to it in writing.

8Traffic and behaviour that are not allowed

Ads must be seen and clicked only by real people with a real interest. You may not, and may not let anyone else:

• use bots, scripts, automated browsers or any tool that loads pages or clicks ads;
• buy or accept traffic from pop-ups, pop-unders, traffic exchanges, paid-to-click or paid-to-visit schemes, or any source that rewards people for visiting or clicking;
• click the ads on your own sites, or ask, encourage or reward anyone to click them;
• place ads so that people click them by accident, or disguise ads as content, menus, downloads or buttons;
• load pages or ads where nobody can see them: hidden frames, stacked ads, pages that reload themselves, or your pages shown inside another site;
• use redirects, cloaking or domain masking, or send ad requests for one site from another;
• run any other ad code that breaks Google’s rules on the same pages.

Tell us before you buy traffic or start a new promotion. If you see traffic you do not recognise, tell us the same day.

9Your visitors and their privacy

• Your site must have a clear privacy policy. It must say that third parties, including Google, show ads on the site and may use cookies and similar technology to do so.
• Where the law requires consent for cookies or personalised ads, getting that consent is your responsibility. This includes Google’s EU User Consent Policy for visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
• You must not pass us, or allow the tag to collect, information that directly identifies a visitor.

10Invalid traffic and deductions

What it is. Invalid traffic is any impression or click that does not come from a real person with a real interest. It includes everything in section 8, whether you caused it, someone you paid caused it, or a third party did it to you.

Who decides. Google and the other buyers decide what is invalid, using their own systems. They rarely explain a decision, and their decision is final. We also run our own checks and may decide for ourselves that traffic is invalid.

What happens to the money.

• Google or another buyer may refuse to pay for invalid traffic, deduct it before paying, or take it back later. This can happen weeks or months after the ads were shown, and after you have been paid.
• Whatever Google or another buyer deducts, withholds or takes back for your sites is deducted from your earnings. We cannot pay you money that we did not receive or had to give back.
• We may also deduct earnings that we reasonably judge came from invalid traffic or from a breach of sections 7 or 8, even where the buyer has not yet deducted them.
• If the deduction relates to money already paid to you, we take it from your next payments. If there are none, you must repay it within 30 days of our request.
• While we or a buyer are looking into suspected invalid traffic, we may hold your payments for the sites and the period concerned.
• Where invalid traffic is serious, repeated or deliberate, we may withhold all unpaid earnings from the affected site for the period in which it happened, remove the site and close your account.
• If Google disables a site or an account, Google normally returns the unpaid revenue to its advertisers. In that case there is nothing for us to pay you for it.

What we may do to protect you. We may switch on a human check, block pages or countries, reduce the number of ads or pause ads on a site, at once and without notice.

What we will do for you. We will tell you about a deduction and show you the amount for each site, as far as the buyer has told us. If you believe a deduction is wrong, write to us within 30 days. We will pass your case to the buyer where the buyer accepts appeals, but we cannot promise a result.

11Earnings and payments

Your payment terms are agreed with your account manager. Your revenue share, payment schedule, minimum payout and payment method are discussed with your account manager and confirmed to you in writing, by email or in your dashboard. Those written terms are part of this agreement. Until they are confirmed in writing, no payment is due.

• What you earn. Your earnings are your agreed share of the revenue that Google and the other buyers actually pay for ads on your sites, after their own deductions, including those in section 10.
• Estimates and final figures. The figures in your dashboard are estimates until the buyer finalises them. We pay on final figures, for revenue we have received.
• How you are paid. By the method agreed with your account manager: bank wire, PayPal, Payoneer or USDT. You get a receipt for every payout.
• Minimum payout. If your balance is below the agreed minimum, it is carried forward to the next payment date.
• Fees and currency. Bank, transfer, network and currency-conversion charges on a payment are yours, unless your written terms say otherwise.
• Correct details. If a payment fails or goes astray because the details you gave were wrong, the cost of recovering or re-sending it is yours.
• When we may hold a payment. During an investigation under section 10; while a buyer is holding the matching revenue; while your identity, site ownership or payment details are unconfirmed; or while you owe us money.
• Set-off. We may deduct anything you owe us from anything we owe you.
• Taxes. You are responsible for the taxes on your earnings. Where the law requires us to withhold tax, we will, and we will tell you.
• Queries. If you think a payment or statement is wrong, tell us within 30 days of receiving it. After that it counts as accepted.
• Unclaimed balances. If we cannot pay you for 12 months because your details are missing or wrong, and we have asked you at least twice at your account email address, the balance is forfeited.

12Reports and numbers

• Reports cover the ad units we run for you and nothing else. They are refreshed several times a day and can change until the buyer finalises the period.
• Where our figures and a buyer’s figures differ, the buyer’s final figures decide what is paid.
• Any figures on our website or in our messages are examples or estimates. They are not a promise of what your site will earn.

13Pausing, removing and closing

By you. You can remove our tag or ask us to close your account at any time.

By us. We may pause ads on a site, remove a site or close your account, at once and without notice, if:

• we find or reasonably suspect invalid traffic or a breach of sections 7, 8 or 9;
• Google, our Google partner or another buyer asks us to, or disables your site or account;
• you gave us false information, or you do not answer our questions about your site or traffic within 7 days;
• you owe us money and have not paid it when asked;
• keeping the site live would put us, our partners or other publishers at risk.

We may also end this agreement for any other reason with 14 days’ notice by email.

What happens to your earnings. When a site is removed or an account is closed, valid earnings up to that day are paid on the normal schedule once the buyers have paid them, less any deductions under section 10. Earnings from invalid traffic or from pages that broke the rules are not paid. Sections 10, 11, 14 to 18 and 20 continue after the agreement ends, and deductions that arrive later still apply.

14Who owns what

• Your site and its content stay yours. You give us permission to read your public pages and show ads on them, as described in these terms, for as long as our tag is on your site.
• The tag, the dashboard, ForgeAI and everything else we build stay ours. You may use them only for your approved sites while this agreement runs.
• We may name your site, privately, to Google, our partners and buyers as part of selling your ad space. We will not use your name or logo in public without asking you.
• If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them freely.

15Keeping things confidential

Your commercial terms, your figures and anything else we tell you in confidence are for you alone. We keep your figures and account details confidential too, apart from the sharing described in section 5.

16No guarantees

• We do not promise any level of revenue, eCPM, fill or viewability, or that any ad will be shown. Buyers decide what they buy and what they pay.
• We do not promise that Google or any partner will approve you, keep you approved, or keep their programmes and prices as they are.
• The service is provided as it is. We work to keep it running, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors.

17The limit of our liability

• We are not liable for lost profit, lost revenue, lost traffic, lost data or any indirect loss.
• We are not liable for what Google, other buyers, partners, payment providers or hosting providers do or fail to do, including refusing, suspending, deducting or delaying.
• In total, our liability to you for anything connected with this agreement is limited to the earnings we paid you in the three months before the event that gave rise to the claim.
• Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited.

18Your responsibility to us

You will cover our losses, including deductions, penalties, refunds and reasonable legal costs, that result from:

• the content of your sites, or a claim that it breaks the law or someone’s rights;
• invalid traffic on your sites, or any breach of sections 7, 8 or 9;
• your breach of Google’s terms or policies, or of the law;
• false or out-of-date information you gave us.

19Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The version number and date at the top of this page show which version is in force. If a change matters to you, we will email you or tell you in your dashboard at least 7 days before it applies, unless the law or Google requires it sooner. If you keep using the service after that, you accept the new version. If you do not accept it, remove our tag and ask us to close your account.

20General

• The whole agreement. These terms and the commercial terms confirmed by your account manager are the whole agreement between us. If the two differ on your revenue share, payment schedule, minimum payout or payment method, the written commercial terms apply. On everything else, these terms apply.
• Independent parties. You are not our employee, agent or partner, and we are not yours.
• Transfer. You may not transfer your account or this agreement without our written consent. We may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganisation of our business.
• If part is invalid. If a court finds part of these terms invalid, the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not act on a breach straight away, we can still act on it later.
• Events outside our control. We are not liable for delay or failure caused by events outside our reasonable control, including changes made by Google.
• Notices. We send notices to your account email address. You send notices to [email protected].
• Law and courts. These terms are governed by the laws of the country in which VisionForgeX is established. The courts of that country have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.
• Language. These terms are written in English. If they are translated, the English version decides.

21Contact

Questions about these terms, a deduction or a payment: write to [email protected], or to your account manager.