TechCrunch on Google’s new PPA product
posted in Technology, Business |TechCrunch has a new post up on Google’s new PPA product. TechCrunch concludes that the affiliate networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. Unless I’m missing something in how Google’s new product works, this is totally misunderstanding how the existing affiliate networks are used. They aren’t used in the traditional ad-sense model of “sprinkle a few links” on the page- if they were, the actual action rate would be so low that it would be a disaster for the publisher. For example, I tried out the Amazon Omakase links for a bit in various places which works in that model and got absolutely nothing.
Most existing usage of the affiliate networks is much more targeted. I’m mentioning a specific product, so I include a link directly to the product. If you are reading about the product on my site, you might be likely to buy it. If Google were to offer publishers a product where they could place specific ads on their sites, THAT would be a huge earthquake in the industry, but this one doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal to any of the existing players (yet).