merged.ca — Plagued with complaints of Adsense click fraud, Google announced a beta test of their new ad network to select publishers today. Instead of Pay-Per-Click, the Google Content Referral Network will compete with existing affiliate marketing networks by paying per lead or per sale. What does it mean for webmasters.... More money or less?
Jun 21, 2006 View in Crawl 4
chengfuJun 21, 2006
I can't imagine Google running a succesful affiliate network. Other than with CPC advertising they will need an awful lot of support people to implement tracking with the merchants and constantly check if the tracking is still ok. Until now Google has only released services that don't need much human service from their side.
travissJun 22, 2006
I can't see this working too great. I think webmasters will make a lot less this way.
kenstoneJun 22, 2006
Merchants who advertise on Adwords/Adsense currently have a little piece of javascript they can put on their sale completion page that talks back to Google to tell them a transaction was completed. This system is how merchants are able to track the effectiveness of their advertising dollars.
1dnaJun 22, 2006
I think this will spawn a new era in spam, you will find a lot of the advertisers are spammers and such. Remeber opt in real big or Scott Richter he was all about spamming with affiliate programs.
envirochemJun 22, 2006
I suspect (but don't yet know for sure) that Google will provide webmasters with the ability to see the eCPM (estimated revenue per thousand impressions) of a CPA ad on a channel per channel basis just like we can with their normal PPC ads. This means that CPA ads that do not have a reasonable eCPM will get abandoned by AdSense publishers and Google them self very quickly. In order to succeed in the Google system, a CPA advertiser's ads will have to perform well just like the PPC ads do.
mntpngJun 22, 2006
Google doesn't have much choice at this point. With massive click fraud bots on the horizon, Google has to come up with a better advertisement model. Doing nothing is more risky than doing something about it.
shattersJun 22, 2006
uhm.. it looks like only one person said that it wouldn't happen so... I don't know if the "I told you so" works here....
isulongseophJun 22, 2006
CPA is way way harder to get than CPC. It will only benefit the bigger publishers.
dailyclerkJun 23, 2006
this would be interesting if Bill Gross from Idea Lab, didn?t do this first. He first created ad bidding with Overture, which he sold to Yahoo! and then began pushing for CPA with SNAP.com. Google isn?t really innovative, they just have the big audience to make it seem like they are innovative when in fact they are just copying someone else.