That is not a viable option to tar them with accusations of not taking. I am sure the vast bulk of domains have amounts of money set aside grossly less than the cost to either party to even start talking to each other. If you want to hand me $1.21, I don't even want to hear from you. (There's hardly any way to do that anyhow without losing most or all of it to fees.)
No, the only other possibly alternative is to return the unused money to those who gave it, but that may have its own problems.
Right, but this does suggest a good way for them to give a good faith effort. What if they put the effort into contacting all X content providers/publishers who 'earned' $Y or more? Even if it were somewhat costly, my appreciation would kick in if I knew they spent time to contact everyone who had earned $20 or more.
Even if the rest of the money went to charity, I'd still have a higher opinion of the way they've ended this operation.
Update: Their terms of services (7b, "Payments") states they won't pay out for amounts under $50. Sounds high given the expectable long tail, but they could put in work to contact those publishers.
That's where the problem lies, they first took money from users, and then "offer" to pay it back. They should've done it the other way around, only charging money for sites which actually signed up to the service.
They've done a good job at making it sound like a great service for publishers, but when you think about it a bit more it's quite shady.
"... they don't want to invest the time" in hunting down the owners of millions of domains? Yeah, that's clearly a good use of $115k - it'll only eat through that much in employee pay by the time they get through, oh, a couple percent. Only a couple percent of which will respond, only a couple percent of which will respond in a timely manner.
If they had given all the money they received to all the current registered publishers, would there be complaint? Instead, they're taking what seems to me to be a more moral stance, which is to hold it until they register, to more-accurately distribute the funds, instead of favoring the people who joined first.