« Keywords as your name in blog comments, spam or sensible?
Are you making money, or making money for the people who are telling you how to make money? »
19

Jan

Google caving on referrals? Gimme a break.

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

Interesting read over at Problogger today. Apparently Google have changed their mind on (some of) the changes that they recently announced regarding their referral program.

You know about the original changes, you’ve read about them everywhere, so I won’t go into that here, but the new changes raise some issues:

From the AdSense blog:

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan…. (my emphasis)

WTF???

This is a joke, right?

So a US Dollar, Yen or Peso is worth more to Google than my Australian Dollar, A Krona, Yuan, or a Rupee?

The combined populations of the USA, Latin America and Japan is around 993 million, around 15% of the world’s population, and apologies to my Latin American friends, but you’re not by any stretch of the imagination an economic or population powerhouse.

One must wonder whether these changes are the result of an oversupply of AdSense publishers and an shortage of AdWords advertisers? Remeber, for every AdSense ad you see, there’s an AdWords advertiser somewhere. Another thought is that Google is struggling for advertisers prepared to expose themselves to the low ROI clicks and outright click fraud on the content network, so they’re using changes to the referral program to slow down the number of new AdSense publisher signups.

Might I suggest that they get a bit tougher on the sites they allow to show AdSense ads as a way of evening up the balance between ad supply and demand instead of punishing genuine content publishers because of where they live?

My fear here is that this is the start of a very slippery slope. With Google being so secretive about the commissions it takes from every ad click, how do we know that publishers who don’t live in the above “Axis of AdSense” are not already being smartpriced on their clicks. Maybe Google is paying different CPC’s based on where the “clicker” is located?

We just don’t know this shit.

As so many are now saying - Don’t rely solely on AdSense for your income, especially if you live outside the Axis of AdSense. It may only take a simple change of policy on Google’s part to kill your business model.

6 comments so far

SarahG says January 20th, 2008 at 4:29 am

I wonder what will happen with referrals already made now? I had a potential 2 in the pipeline, doesn’t sound much until that equates to $200. I wonder if they’re from the allowed countries I may still keep them or if they’re not then I still lose out. Glad they’re just a nice little bonus and not a relied income!

Binh Nguyen says January 20th, 2008 at 5:35 am

Google has reduced the referral value a while back already. This is not a great news anyway. I’m OK with it because I don’t have much intention on that bonus and I haven’t made any referral.

I think AdBrite is going to answer the calls and jump up the competition with Google.

The decision is made because only those countries give better click value. But hey, that’s funny because we publishers are located around the world but targeting USA for the clicks anyway, then why would Google care about that?

And yes, making a new friend is better than making a new enemy. They might take a strike back soon if they keep squeezing our neck.

Also, Google should try to expend their marketing effort to global market instead of squeezing the publisher’s site. And who wouldn’t know that Google so far has been squeezing publishers hard already and they think only their customers are god.

Google long has forgotten, or maybe they don’t know at all. Might be they don’t have a well educated guy behind their CEO. They don’t know that publishers are also their customers. Google! We, publishers are your internal customers too, so please take us fairly as GOD. Serve us well and we serve you back. Dump us and we dump you.

That’s all I can say for now… Google discrimination turn my blood up the head too much, so sorry for the fuel language.

With Google being so secretive about the commissions it takes from every ad click, how do we know that publishers who don’t live in the above “Axis of AdSense” are not already being smartpriced on their clicks. Maybe Google is paying different CPC’s based on where the “clicker” is located?

Stuart, don’t you know that all along Google pay CPC differently based on buyer location? Yeah! That bring up another issue with discrimination… no disclosure of CPC.

Regards,
Binh

stuart says January 20th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

A Sarah - My understanding is if they don’t reach the $100 by the end of January, you can kiss them goodbye. I could be wrong though, it’s been known to happen…. ;-)

@ Binh - If you’re right about Google pay CPC differently by buyer location, that’s something I didn’t know!

Wow, maybe I’m out of the loop….

Mieszkanie says January 21st, 2008 at 5:55 am

Unfortunately in Poland other CPC systems than google adsense almost doesn’t exist. There are some but give only about 20% of ad cost.

stuart says January 21st, 2008 at 6:34 am

20% dude?

I’d be giving up alltogether….

Louisiana says January 28th, 2008 at 11:15 am

A good friend of mine that is extremely honest and good at what he does just got pulled by adsense. I don’t trust them at all, and this is another example.

Leave a Comment:

Name (required)
Mail (will not be published) (required)
Website
Message