Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)  is rebranding Doubleclick Inc. as Google Affiliate Network .   So google is now taking on the Affiliate network industry and competes with affiliate network heavyweights such as ValueClick’s Commission Junction and LinkShare.

This move isn’t a surpise since google has been in the business for quite some time with its google adsense program which is based on  “cost-per-click” business model.   It’s just a matter of time they enter the “Cost-per-action and Cost-per-lead” business model offered by affiliate network.

I’ll definitely try this one out and see how it goes.

Has anyone tried this yet?  Your feedback is most welcome here  at the comments area.

Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Adsense Referrals (not Adsense itself) will be retired by end of August.   This was due to the integration of Doubleclick to Google Affiliate Network.  They would like to focus more on the Affiliate network.

Adsense referrals  works like an affiliate program wherein you make money when a new person enters the adsense program and make money.   Such income was supplemental to the monthly adsense income publishers get and I believe a lot of people are going to miss this.

Nevertheless, it’s time to use those precious real estate for something that can make more money so don’t forget to take down all those adsense referral icons and replace it with an affiliate link or other money making venture.

[via adsense.blogspot.com ]

Google has recently made a very good post in its adsense blog on how to diagnose and treat adsense revenue fluctuations.

The post gives you an idea on what to look out for when diagnosing the cause of the revenue fluctuation, and most importantly, the possible solutions and things to do next to “treat” your website.

I believe this is a must read for those into Adsense. It is a 2-part series. I won’t anymore summarize the material. You must read it and understand it properly. Here are the links.

Part I

Part II

I already bookmarked these 2 URLs in my FireFox bookmarks. These 2 posts are definitely a keeper.

[via Inside Adsense ]

Eversince Google created video.google.com and later on purchased youtube.com it is no doubt that someday, they will introduce video ads as well. It’s just a matter of time.

This gives youtube users who frequently upload original video content a way to monetize their videos. However, if one doesn’t have original video content, they still can participate in the adsense for video program.

The video above provides some more details about Google’s new video ad offerings.

[via google video ads ]

Just another issue in Google’s automated machine appeared last week with an Adsense publisher being banned after being specifically permitted to act in such way.

The WebmasterWorld story tells about an Internet cafe owner with about 60 kiosks around Las Vegas who created a custom default homepage with Adsense ads and a Google search box. This guy emailed Google, got the issue cleared and even made about $20-$30 a day. He said “People from the kiosk did about 150 searches per day and check out my Vegas website.”

Shortly thereafter, the guy got the dreaded “ban email” sent for fraudulent clicks. Obviously, the access amount of clicks from the same IP address block triggered the click-fraud bot but after the issue has been cleared one would hope that all related parts of the machine would know about it.

I must add that the guy did not do anything against the Adsense TOS.

[via Barry]

The Adsense blog announced that their crawler is now able to crawl password protected areas, if given the right credentials off course. This new addition comes to allow publishers with premium content areas have better targeted contextual ads in their protected areas.

To enable “Site Authentication” simply login to your Adsense account and follow the instructions on the page:

Note that this feature is only available to such accounts which have already upgraded to using a Google account.

An extensive Webmasterworld thread developing over the past week is outlining Google’s plan to “get rid” of publishers whose business model revolves around sending Adwords traffic to an MFA (Made for Adsense) site in an attempt to profit from the margin between the cost and the revenue (a.k.a search arbitrage).

In the thread, several publishers described an email, sent out by Google, and which says that “our specialists found that your business model is not a good fit for the AdSense program,” and adds that the account will be terminated as of June 1st while all profits earned by then will be paid out in full.

Some people speculated that this is Google’s attempt to clean up its ad network before allowing advertisers to view where exactly their ads are presented. Shoemoney pointed out that none of the big publishers / advertisers have received this notice, but only some smaller ones and the whole thing should be disregarded.

Bottom line, yes, this is an attempt on Google’s side to clean up their network, but on the same not this is not the end search arbitrage but only the end of non-productive search arbitrage from the advertisers’ standpoint. So, bottom line, the network will be cleaner, as well as more profitable for advertisers.

YPN and Adcenter have been getting a lot of slack about their relevancy, slack which Google managed to get away with due to their great Adsense platform. However, sometimes, even Google goes wrong and in this case it isn’t even the wrong text ad but an ad which I found on a very popularity celebrity gossip blog. See for yourself:

Inside Adsense posted yesterday about the new addition of a new “Recent Messages” section to each account. These message will include, for the most part, results & suggestions from Google’s automatic analysis of one’s pages in an attempt to help improve performance.

We’re happy to let you know that this is your personal inbox where we’ll send you customized optimization tips. More specifically, our system will automatically analyze your account and ad settings. Based on these findings, you’ll receive a notification each month in your AdSense account if there are changes you can make to improve your overall AdSense performance.

Personally, on my account, the only suggestion offered in April’s “optimization report” was to add Adsense for Search to my sites.