Since the begninning of November 2005 Google Adsense has been giving away $100 per referral. Here’s why you should turn that money down and concentrate on the big bucks.
Background to Adsense:
The Google Adsense contextual advertising program has been making waves ever since it started some three years ago. It offered the easiest way ever for webmasters to convert their traffic to cash; they simply signed up for the program, copied some javascript code from Google, pasted it into their pages and the Google machine generated a check for them at the end of each month. There was no competitor to the Google Adsense program. That, combined with the simplicity of the system, quickly acquired Google a frighteningly large number of sign-ups. Quite how large their “publisher” base is can be gauged by a cursory glance at a few sites you normally go to. Any sites. That’s right - many of them have Adsense ads.
The Adsense ad is ubiquitous, it’s cleverly designed to blend into some sites to look like content (and who hasn’t accidentally clicked one of those?), and it doesn’t look like what you’re conditioned to think is advertising. It’s not a banner, it’s not animated, and surfers didn’t have to resist their ad-hate to click on them. So they got clicks.
Where is Adsense now?
Adsense is a victim of its own success. Almost every regular internet user now knows what an Adsense ad looks like and, if they have a natural reluctance to click ads, they avoid them. Further, having so many publishers means that the available ad inventory is getting spread thinner and thinner and publishers are noticing the ad relevance dropping and CTRs being affected. Google, however, can’t sit still. They have to innovate and improve and move to larger volumes and larger profits. And for that they need more publishers and advertisers.
Hence the referral program.
It works like this: You recommend someone try the Adsense program and if they make $100 out of it Google will pay them the $100 and match it with a $100 payment to you. Sounds like a good deal. What have you got to lose by sending Google new publishers and getting a free $100 bill?
I still say: Turn it down. I’ll elaborate in a minute.
What’s the other reason Google’s paying commission?
Getting new advertisers and new publishers is not something that has suddenly become useful, has it? Throughout its history Adsense had a vested interest in building the publisher base. Why pay money for it now when they didn’t for so many years? I think I have the answer: It’s because there’s serious competition now. The thinking has got to be along the lines of … when we were a “monopoly” we were the only game in town and could afford to let publishers find us. Now that there’s competition we need to make a little more effort to keep up the growth.
Which is all very well but the sharper ones among you would have already formed a question. Competition? What competition? Tell me more.
Programs like the Yahoo Publisher Network, Microsoft’s AdCenter and Chitika’s eMiniMalls are all targeted at the same publishers who are running Adsense. What’s more is that they have aggressive plans to build big publisher bases themselves and aggressive plans often involve paying commissions. Which leads to the most interesting question of all: If I’m going to be recommending a particular program shouldn’t I be recommending the program that pays the most rather than the program that’s been around the longest? Bingo! You’ve got it. Getting new publishers to sign up to anything is no easy task. If you’re expending time and/or money to sign them up you want to make the most for yourself. What’s wrong with that?
So far there are only two major contextual ad programs that pay you a commission for getting your webmaster mates to sign up. They’re Adsense and Chitika. Chitika pays 10% of what your referral makes in the first 12 months. Adsense pays a flat $100 when your referral reaches $100 in earnings. Summary: If your referrals are going to make more than $1,000 in the first year ($84 a month) then Chitika is going to be more profitable.
But the bottom line is something that most affiliates aren’t going to recognise and that’s where you have the distinct advantage. You realise that it’s going to be a lot more difficult finding Adsense a new publisher who’s never used them before. C’mon, everybody and his dog has heard about Adsense. Do you know a webmaster who hasn’t? Chitika, on the other hand, is a new kid in town and you can “sell” Chitika to both those webmasters who’ve never heard of Adsense (if you can find any) and to every webmaster who has! That’s a massively larger playing field.
Being the honest person you are you don’t want to recommend something based purely on your personal profit; you want to recommend what’s best for the friend you’re making the recommendation to. You’re going to be pleasantly surprised. Chitika has a fresh look, an irrestible looking ad format, a usually much higher EPC and those select few who’ve tried it out already have been raving about how much more profitable it’s been for them. (If your referrals find it just as profitable for them remember it’s 10% for you!) Take it for a test drive today and if you need reasons to promote it to your webmaster friends as being the best affiliate program around you can always point them to our review of the Chitika eMiniMalls program.
The author’s website presents an extensive review of the
Chitika program, and offers
revenue enhancing ideas particularly in relation to maximizing earnings from Chitika without losing any Adsense revenue.
