Update on the Adsense Affiliate Program

Posted on January 23, 2008 
Filed Under Affiliate Management, Affiliate Programs, NZ Affiliate Market

Google have already back-tracked a bit on the removal of the Adsense Affiliate Program. It looks like they only removed it for certain areas and just assumed that if an affiliate was in a certain location then they were only referring users from that location. Now that’s a pretty basic mistake for any affiliate program to make. In my experience it’s pretty rare that affiliates are only targeting their own local population unless it’s a non-English language site.

From the email;

Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.

You can usually read that type of language from any affiliate program as marketing speak for “Half of our affiliates vehemently complained, we admit we screwed up and now we’ve been forced into changing the policy” :)

That might be a little harsh, Google are doing well to keep the communication lines open to affiliates.

The changes they’ve put forward are;

Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.

So, one would assume that in countries where they have an overwhelming market share and everyone uses them as the first option for online marketing (this is pretty much how it works in New Zealand with their 95% share) then they’re dropping the affiliate program completely.

Sounds like a pretty solid business decision.

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Heads-up for Domain Name Affiliates

Posted on March 28, 2007 
Filed Under Affiliate Resources, NZ Affiliate Market

The New Zealand Domain Name Commission is reducing the .nz wholesale doman registration fee by 14% in July 2007.

This is going to take a lot of work by the domain registrars who are at the cheap registration end of the market to get their new pricing structures sorted out. Althought, as mentioned in the announcement below there is no direct pressure from the commission for the retail prices to drop;


.nz Domain Name Fee Reduction Announced - 29 Mar 2007 09:15

InternetNZ (The Internet Society of New Zealand) is reducing by 14% the wholesale domain name fee charged to authorised .nz registrars by .nz Registry Services (NZRS).

Colin Jackson, InternetNZ President, says “The InternetNZ Council is pleased to confirm that the wholesale domain name fee will reduce to $1.50 per domain name per month, down from $1.75 per domain name per month.” These figures are exclusive of GST.

The new wholesale fee will apply from 1 July 2007. “We trust that early notification of the lower fee will assist registrars in their planning,” says Jackson.

The decision to reduce the fee is the outcome of a joint recommendation from the .nz Oversight Committee (NZOC) and NZRS to the InternetNZ Council.

Dr Frank March, Chair of the NZOC, says he hopes that the lower fee will encourage the continuation of a healthy growth rate in the registration of new domain names. However he cautions “There is no obligation on registrars to pass on any savings they make in a reduction of the wholesale fee.”

Dr March continues “The .nz market is a competitive environment and I hope that the range of authorised registrars will encourage some to reduce the retail price.”

The reduction in the wholesale domain name fee is the second drop since NZRS took over running the .nz domain name register in October 2002.

NZRS Chair, Anne Urlwin, says “The result of the fee review is a successful outcome for everyone. We take our responsibilities in managing the .nz register seriously, and are pleased that we’ve achieved efficiencies in our systems that enable this decrease in the fee to registrars.”

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Program List for New Zealand Affiliates

Posted on February 18, 2007 
Filed Under Affiliate Programs, NZ Affiliate Market

Here is a New Zealand affiliate program list which has been compiled recently of all the affiliate programs which could be found relating directly to the New Zealand affiliate market. Updates will be continual on the list as and when new programs are found. If you have any you’d like to add to the list then please suggest it.

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Advantages to using an affiliate network

Posted on January 29, 2007 
Filed Under Affiliate Networks, NZ Affiliate Market

Something which does not appear to have caught on yet in New Zealand, probably because of the lack of market size, is the idea of larger affiliate networks with multiple affiliated products available for advertising.

All of the affiliate programs I have seen around specifically run by New Zealand sites also seem to be running their own internal development of the affiliate programs. This is a good idea if your company has large internal development resources but can be quite expensive in any other situation.

There are many advantages to being part of a wider affiliate network if you have a product to promote. The two main ones are having access to a large database of affiliates, beyond what a small site could recruit as well as having access to an affiliate network’s technology for serving your advertising to the affiliates.

Let’s hope we’ll see something like this emerge in the New Zealand affiliate market soon.

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New Zealand and Australian Ad-Tech, Sydney

Posted on January 23, 2007 
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, NZ Affiliate Market

Looks like I’ll be heading off to Ad-Tech in Sydney on the 7th & 8th of February. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an Australian Marketing conference and most of the top New Zealand companies and executives working online will be there so it should be a good catch-up in the local market. When you’re working online in affiliate marketing it is very easy to become wholly focused on offshore markets as they have significantly larger potential (read that as population) than New Zealand and Australia. Even so, there needs to be more focus on the local New Zealand affiliate market so I’ll be making sure I can find any insights relating to what’s coming up in 2007 for our local sites.

I just read on the Ad-Tech site that Jon Ostler from First Rate (New Zealand’s leading corporate search marketing operation) has sold to an Australian listed company. Jon impressed me after a few discussions we had at the first Search Engine Strategies conference in Sydney. This was around 2002, when Google had only just opened it’s Australian offices and search was only really coming into mainstream corporate focus in New Zealand. It’ll be interesting to see how First Rate deals with the takeover from an Australian company and opening offices in Sydney. Hopefully not too much of the local New Zealand focus will be lost.

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Multi-tiered affiliate programs or sub-affiliates

Posted on January 1, 2007 
Filed Under Affiliate Management, Affiliate Programs

There are many people in the affiliate industry that consider multi-tier affiliate programs to be a negative thing for the affiliate community. The negative association appears (from what I have seen) to be linked with issues regard pyramid scheme style programs. This can often lead to affiliate programs who have no relationship to these types of schemes being labelled as un-trustworthy, merely because they allow sub-affiliates to exist.

The ability to promote to other affiliates about a specific affiliate program and receive a commission for bringing that affiliate into the program, to myself, is a natural occurance. Why would an affiliate program not want new affiliates and why would the promoter not deserve a cut? It is the reason for affiliate programs.

Regardless of your stance on this, most affiliate programs that I have come across globally allow promotion to sub-affiliates although the revenue to the promoter is not usually very high as the margins are cut back significantly for the affiliate program when more than one person is involved. The key here is for the program to be very up-front with any joining affiliate when they have signed up through another affiliate’s tracking link.

Interestingly, in New Zealand affiliate programs, I have yet to find a program that allows for sub-affiliates and the promotion of the affiliate itself. I am unsure if this is a techincal issue, as many New Zealand affiliate progams are developed in-house and are therefore not as technically advanced as other larger programs, or if this is a larger issue with the New Zealand affiliate market believing there are problems with multi-tiered affiliate programs.

As I research further into the New Zealand market and the programs available we will see.

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New Zealand vs Australia

Posted on December 27, 2006 
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing

A common theme among affiliate information and programs currently available is the joining of any New Zealand affiliate programs or information with Australian programs. This leads in many cases to the New Zealand programs staying in the background or generally applying all of the ideas behind the needs for Australian programs as completely applicable in New Zealand.

While New Zealand is understandably a small affiliate market on the global scale, with the large percentage of the population currently online it can be hoped that in time more programs will split their New Zealand information separately. This can only lead to a better facilitated New Zealand affiliate market.

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