No More Adsense Referrals For Naming Sake

It was a good combination of adsense referrals program to be part of the whole Adsense program of showing Google Ads on our blogs and websites. However, Adsense Referrals Program is retiring by end of August 2008. This means that we have to remove our no-longer-working links from our websites. And in place of Adsense Referrals Program, Google is using Google Affiliate Network (part of the integration of DoubleClick).

In other words, we have to change our links accordingly to be part of Google Affiliate Network.

Well, I thought they could have integrated DoubleClick into part of the Adsense Program since it will only make it stronger.

Probably they wanted an easier reference of the naming convention to be part of Google network.

Well, let’s take a look at the following terms:

Google Adsense – Make money from ads

Google Adwords – Buy Google Ads

Google Analytics – Analyse your site

Google Affiliate Network – Make referral sales

Yes, it does make sense to call it as Google Affiliate Network. It can be confusing to called it as “Google Adsense Referrals Program”. After Google has acquired DoubleClick, they must have thinking of how to position this to their strength. And they might as well rename the whole Google naming for it.

Think about it. Google does work like Microsoft nowadays. Google is dominating the whole Internet, just like Microsoft is dominating the desktop market. Both are acquiring useful (or I should call it threatening?) companies for their usage, or to let it rot…

Hopefully, this is not going to hurt any new creativity or entrepreneurship. It seems like many companies has been trying to create buzzing websites with no sign of making profits at all for the last few years. They could be working towards permission marketing arena, or probably waiting for Google to acquire them sooner or later… Everybody has been talking about how Twitter is going to make money online, while ZDNet suggests that Twitter could become the next PayPal.