Google Affiliate Network

Some years ago I signed up to Google's AdSense service, just to see how it worked. Google cancelled the referrals part of AdSense in August 2008, but invited customers to try their "Affiliate Network". This is based on DoubleClick, which was acquired by Google. It has a controversial history. I will try it out with just a few ads on a few of my web page and see how it works.

While some have criticisms of Google, I found the AdSense service worked reasonably well. It seemed to make a genuine attempt to find relevant and non-objectionable ads to match the web page the ads were on (Amazon.com seem to be unable or unwilling to do this with their ads). It will be interesting to see how the Affiliate Network ads go. So far I have noticed that Google have not fully integrated the new service into the overall system, apart from applying Google layout to the web pages. Now I am going to start by reading some of the help pages, to see what to do first.

The previous Google referrals system was complicated. I found it difficult find any suitable ads for my web site and there were few responses to the ads which I did select. From a quick look, Affiliate Network has a similar interface and may have simialr problems. The difficulty is having to manually select ads for the web site. It would be much easier if the system could select the ads for me.