Adsense is giving away $100 bills, Don't Accept Them

Mark Wallace

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 instead.

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. (And if your referrals have the same sort of
success with Chitika you get 10% of it!) Take Chitika 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 href="http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1098-affiliate-programs
/2.htm">our review of the Chitika eMiniMalls program.

About the author:

The author's website presents an extensive review of the href="http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1098-affiliate-programs
/">Chitika program, and offers revenue enhancing ideas and
href="http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1098-affiliate-programs
/chitika-eminimalls-help.htm">site reviews

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