Google required Feedburner recently, was this acquisition just another company on their way to becoming the Ultimate Super Affiliate?
You already now that RSS Feeds are the Future instead of eMails… 

Everybody who works with Adsense knows that Google already promotes their own products via a CPA model, for every Picassa or Google Pack installation and activation you get payed, not for the Clicks.

They already Bought Doubleclick and probably paid to much for the company to get the Information of Performics and its Data.

But where does this interest in those Companies come from?

In August of last year there was this report called “The Death of Adsense” and of course the Top people at Google must have read it, since they have to protect there product..

In that report one of the items is the fact that Adsense advertising revenues for publishers have dropped due to the introduction of “Smart pricing”. Which gives the AdWords user the possibility to get more Bang for their Bugs.
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html

But a more important phenomenon was introduced “Click Flipping” in which you, as an Affiliate would buy adverts on Google, targeting the keywords for the products your marketing and sending people the buy through your affiliate link, sometimes passing them through your websites, or directly tho the sales page of the product manufacturer.
Well, you get the principal idea behind it.

Let say you buy ads with you keywords at 0.05 dollar, 1 in 1000 (ads costs 50.00 Dollar) will buy the product that sells for 250.00 Dollar.
The affiliate pays you 125,00 dollar, profit will be 75.00 Dollars…
(All numbers are fictitious of course).

Google and Affiliates 

The Top Guys at Google now understand all of a sudden that they are leaving money on the table!
They get 50.00 Dollars where they could have gotten 125.00 Dollars..hmmm..

So the Thoughts comes to mind…
What do we need to get into this Affiliate Business?

First we need to have products to promote, so should we buy Clickbank?
No, that would be to obvious, lets buy DoubleClick! Then we get the advantage of the knowledge to handle all the aspects of Affiliates.

And the Payments for these products? We don't want that done by a separate company like paypal… no, we can use Google Checkout for that. The Product is there already.

So, we got the products site covered, and the payments handled, what's next..ah, the promoters of your products, a key part in the process…

Adsense Publishers

Wait, we already have a large base of people selling for us.. the Adsense Publishers!!
Yes, but they are only used to get there ads delivered to them, not actively promote them.
 So..?  We need to educate them and convince them of the benefits of promoting these products!

We could use that to introduce them to CPA by giving them small products to promote, like say Picassa or Google Pack.
Lets call it “Referrals” and we encourage them to Promote these products.

Now we have to optimize the Process to get the most out of it for the best results and the highest return.

First thing to do is to make sure the Landing pages of the Products are as good as they might get, so lets start this initiative by working on the AdWords landing pages, should be a nice testing ground.
And in the process the products suppliers learn how to make the best conversions pages as well

After that, we will give the publishers some nice incentives to get working on this Referral thing some more to make sure they are well conditioned if we go live..

Can we do some things to be able to target the prospects group even better?
Yes, we can manipulate… ehh, sorry, Personify the search results to fit the users profile even better and then bring better targeted offers! (Ps. a good explanation of these Personalized Search effects can be read at Thinkseer )

So, we are ready to send out some personal invitations to the CPA program.
Of course we first send out invitations to the “Google Adsense CPA Beta” to high profile entrepreneurs to see what is possible.

So, I thinks we are ready to get going with this CPA stuff…

And people are just thinking the Google is just the Term for referring to Googol as the amount of data we want to index :-)
But its actually the kind of money we want to make….

Ahh, Just as long as we don't do Evil..

Well, just a little bit then, lets take out some of the competition first by cleaning out the Arbitrage Publishers from our Adsense accounts…

And then Promote using Adsense for Affliates…

But what does this mean for the current affiliate products suppliers like Clickbank?
They will certainly get a big competitor to tackle with!

Is this a Good Development?

I don't know, for the product suppliers, probably yes, for the middleman like Clickbank, definitely NO.

For the Adsense Publishing Webmaster it will mean a new way of earning money on their site, if they are willing to go that extra mile of referrals.

The biggest advantage lies with the AdWords Publishers, they get an extra opportunity to promote their products through a large base of publishers.
Based on a the possibility just o pay Google for the action, not the Clicks.
Which in return gives Google the opportunity to diversify and giving an alternatief for Adword users that are afraid of Click Fraud.