Google may be about to kill affiliate marketing links
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Frankly, this is not a new issue. It's just the effort by Google to use publisher content & data for their own profit continues to expand.
I always end up going to Wirecutter and their related sites for product reviews as they are the modern Consumer Reports. In those circumstances, the affiliate link will still function as anticipated.
Google could add a ”Buy now” button there, handling customer shipping data and payment and just forward the order to merchant that serves customer’s location.
For smaller vendors it might be interesting to replace AdWords with the possibility to list stuff for sale. Instead of click price, you would tell how big cut of price you give to Google if customer makes the purchase.
True. Publishers always hated that Facebook and Google would share too much of an article on their own platforms that no one would click through, and they'd miss the ad impression.
This thing is a similar issue but missing out on affiliate clicks instead of ad impressions.
I'm glad the author is keen and pointing it out, though.
If they drop me in the search results because I use affiliate marketing they are basically cutting 50% of my income. That's a pretty hard hit, specially when I'm not a computer scientist and I can't just look for another job that easy in my country.
Question is how this will work with the courts. There's already a law suit in Germany brought by a large price comparison site against Google, suing for 500m because Google pushes their own "Google Shopping" results in SERPs, claiming they are abusing their monopoly.
After all, why should they? The entertainment industry has acted atrociously to consumers in recent decades - it's just a shame that independent content creators are being stifled (declining ad revenue, refusal to pay, etc..) by the behaviour of megacorps.
The last time I had checked current reviews (though that was for tech products, now for DIY home improvement), I got researched lists with information – and happily clicked on the amazon.de affiliate link.
Now? I checked 20 sites that literally all had the same content because it was nothing but the highlights extracted from the Amazon product page. Utterly useless.
Don't rely on those too much, I've had some business with the publishers of those sites, and they are very low quality and basically just push the products that sell well, not the best ones. It's a scam, which is also why they usually won't say that they did a "test" (instead it's just a "comparison"), because that would hold them to higher standards and they'd catch too much flak.
Google will continue to build out lines of business that make sense in a post search world (hardware, shopping platform, ....?)