Thankfully I was unaffected this time, but Google is again showing just how loosely they interpret their own “don’t be evil” mantra.
A Timeline
April 2007 – Google acquires DoubleClick, and all it’s subsidiary businesses including Performics, the affiliate marketing network. Conflict of interest, anyone?
June 2008 – Google rebrands Performics as the Google Affiliate Network (GAN).
October 2009 – Google integrates the publisher payment platform for GAN with their payment platform for Adsense.
Adsense is the division of Google’s business that pays website owners to host Google ads on their website, like the kind that used to appear just to the right of this post (more on why they’re gone later). What does that have to do with affiliate marketing? Absolutely nothing.
For most publishers, linking their Adsense and GAN accounts was a non-issue. For me, it took just a couple minutes. But for others, it was impossible. And with Google leaving not a single other payment option, these publishers were kicked out of GAN on November 1st. Some sort of perceived policy violation (click-fraud, for example – maybe these users clicked on one of their Adsense links once to test if it worked 5 years ago…) prevented them from being able to link accounts. In the vast majority of cases, I think it would be difficult to prove any pattern of “criminal intent” on the part of the publisher.
And from what I’ve heard, there is no recourse. You can appeal but no one will ever hear out your case. There’s no number to call, no human interaction, you’re just screwed. It’s management by algorithm, which as we’ve seen can both be incredibly smart and terribly stupid.
Google is excited to gain efficiencies by only having one payment system. And they’re excited because now they get to hold publishers’ money an extra 30 days before paying them. They’ve even come out and said with pride that the transition to the Adsense platform was a resounding success, with only 1% of publishers being unable to link accounts. That 1% is an acceptable amount of collateral damage to the company with a market cap of $170 billion.
But to the 1% — the small businesses that relied on income from GAN advertisers — it was a devastating move. To have their long-term relationships with advertisers severed by Adsense (again, completely unrelated to affiliate marketing) is absolutely brutal. And terrible business for all parties involved. Remember, Google makes a fee on every affiliate transaction, so they’re hurting themselves too.
The affiliate relationship is one between the advertiser and the publisher; the job of the network is to track sales and keep everyone honest. In ending these mutually beneficial relationships, Google has clearly over-stepped the bounds of their responsibility. It’s lose-lose-lose. The advertiser loses sales from productive affiliates they approved to promote them, the publisher loses income since they can no longer promote GAN advertisers, and Google loses the network transaction fee on all those potential sales.
To protect myself, I’ve removed Adsense from all my sites. The risk of setting of their alarms, maybe even by a competitor with malicious intent, isn’t worth it.
I can’t understand why a company that purports to be so smart and benevolent can be so unresponsive after making these arbitrary decisions that hurt all their customers. If they’re so concerned about letting these publishers into Adsense, why not let them open an affiliate-only version of it just to collect affiliate payments and disable the actual Adsense code. I bet one engineer could figure out how to do that in less than a day. But then again, that would be management by reason, not management by algorithm.
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Tags: google
Goggle is evil, very evil. I hope all their advertisers switch networks