The AdSense™ Domino Theory
How Google could end up paying $2500
for a 2 cent click
Google introduced a referral or affiliate program to its AdSense system in 2005. At the time of writing this program pays you $100 if
1) you are in AdSense yourself, and
2) you refer someone else to AdSense who then joins and makes $100 themselves: a threshold that kicks off your commission.
So first up, there’s a couple of unusual features here: the payout is generous and no-one needs to buy anything for you to make your commission unlike most affiliate schemes. This means that one of the major barriers to making any money yourself – that of getting someone else to part with it – just doesn’t apply. In fact you make money simply by helping someone else make money themselves by joining AdSense.
Now here’s where the fun starts.
Suppose person A refers person B to AdSense. And person B refers person C who refers person D and so on down to person Z. And then let’s assume that none of these people manage to make more than a dollar or two from AdSense in the early days – except person Z who does quite nicely.
In fact Z makes $100 from AdSense within a week (because he already has a lot of traffic coming to his site and his content is attracting high paying ads).
What happens then is where the AdSense domino effect kicks in.
Z makes $100 and therefore person Y, who referred him to AdSense in the first place, qualifies for his $100 commission. Person Y has then made $100 at which point person X also qualifies which means person W does too and so on all the way back up to person A.
So that last little click on an AdSense ad on a web page owned by person Z that tipped him over the $100 threshold and might only have made Google a couple of cents suddenly costs Google $2500 in commission payments! They will of course have gained 25 new AdSense enthusiasts though who can look forward to their first commission payments of at least $100 a month or so later.
In practice of course this is a highly unlikely scenario but it does emphasize the point that if you ignore the AdSense referral program you could be throwing good money away.
This article Copyright © 2006 William Charlwood
AdSense and Google are trademarks of Google Inc.
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This article reproduction rights
You may reproduce this article on your own website if you wish but you must keep all links and trademark notices intact and include this notice. Please do not use my referral button though - use your own and make some money!
(c) 2006 Commercial Reality Ltd
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