Recently, Google Affiliate Network rolled out a transition of their payment processing to Google Adsense. Through an easy process, you link your GAN account to an Adsense account (existing or new) and your GAN payments will be processed through Adsense.
From a personal standpoint, I’m mostly ambivalent on the matter. As long as we get paid, I don’t really care how. We get paid every month from Google Adsense, so fine with me.
From the perspective of my former role as an affiliate network product manager, it is a no-brainer move on Google’s part. It gives GAN an opportunity to improve their payment process, pay in dozens of currencies, cost savings through efficiencies, improved reporting, and many other benefits.
For these reasons, surely the old Doubleclick/Performics platform has a death sentence while the entire platform is migrated over to Google technology.
But finally, from my care-about-the-industry-and-the-publishers-in-it perspective, there are some very serious issues that come out of this change.
- Payment from GAN goes back to monthly from bi-monthly. Surely many publishers enjoyed the more frequent payments that Performics offered.
- Some publishers seem to not want to join Adsense. A Google rep has stated publicly on ABW, and a Googler reiterated to me personally this morning (see below) that there’s no requirement to actually USE Adsense. Just an account is required to receive payment. I’m unclear where the reluctance remains. Maybe it’s that giving in more to the Google is anathema to some people.
- The biggest sticking point is that there are some publishers active in Google Affiliate Network who have been banned from Adsense. These publishers may not be able to get an Adsense account. Period. This means that they will not be able to operate in Google Affiliate Network either. If you’re one of those publishers, that’s a tough pill to swallow.
To get to the bottom of some of these issues, I got on the phone with Larry Adams from Google. Larry is a product manager for Google Affiliate Network.
Larry did confirm that these issues are real. He did assure me that GAN will work with any publisher to try and resolve any issues keeping them from getting access to Google Adsense. In some cases they will succeed, but the reality is that it will not be possible in all cases. If the Adsense team won’t budge on a ban, the publisher is out of luck and won’t be able to continue in Google Affiliate Network.
Does this suck? Definitely. I hate that even one good publisher can be impacted in the pocketbook or even possibly be put out of business.
But when you think about this from Google’s business perspective, it’s not hard to see how it came to this.
Is it a good business for Google to consolidate payment processing for a company they acquired? Yes.
Are there other good reasons for Google to want to pay GAN publishers through Adsense? Yes, they’ve got a well established process and can pay in 40 some-odd currencies. That alone is a good reason.
Are there publishers who will be lost because they will not be allowed in (or back in) to Adsense? Certainly, but if you look at this at a high level, there very likely isn’t a very big revenue impact to that decision. And there probably isn’t even a huge number of publishers that will be impacted. From a sheer numbers perspective, it’s probably negligible.
Only when you look at it on a case-by-case basis do you see that individual people are getting hurt by this. And that’s what sucks. While most probably got banned from Adsense for a good reason, I’m sure many of these people feel that they were unfairly removed from Adsense.
If I was one of those people, and I truly felt that I was wrongly banned from Adsense, I’d be screaming at anyone who will listen.
The fact of the matter is that for one reason or another ALL of those impacted publishers are not wanted in the Adsense network. As far as Google is concerned they have their reasons. If these publishers are not wanted in the Adsense network, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t want them in the affiliate network either. (I do feel that Google’s policy of issuing lifetime bans from Adsense is quite harsh, but that’s a different discussion.)
This event likely would have happened at some point as Google integrates the Affiliate Network further into their Publisher platform. It just so happens that the payment integration is the breaking point.
Unfortunately, there are no grandfather clauses in company acquisitions. And as one of my high school social studies teachers loved to say, and he said it often, life isn’t fair.
If you find yourself in this situation, start working with the GAN support team now to try and get the issue with the Adsense team resolved. They will try to help.
But I wouldn’t count on getting special consideration from the infamously stubborn Adsense team. Start looking at what other networks you can promote your merchants through. Talk to the merchant. Many will have programs in CJ or in-house. And perhaps be prepared to explain why Google doesn’t want you.
As if we haven’t learned this a hundred times before, it doesn’t pay to piss off Google.
For further information, opinions, and discussions on this, see this thread at ABW.
Update: There’s a good discussion going on at the copy of this blog post on my Facebook account.
