With absolutely no press, no notice, absolutely little attention, Google will be closing it’s affiliate network, GAN. This was completely ignored by the mainstream press and as of this writing, no one had even noticed that the scuttling of the network — and if the company hadn’t had a small blog post about it, perhaps no one would have noticed or believed that it was happening.
To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.
In fact, even Google News as of this writing had absolutely nothing whatsoever about its closing. We even called their press line and tried to speak to someone, and a spokesperson told us that they hadn’t heard any news about this, and that they had no comment. Seemingly, it was closing, but no one actually knew about it closing, even at their company.
That being said, it seems that the network was being closed not just because it wasn’t producing much at all for the company but had been plagued with numerous problems for clients and creating extensive client complaints.We spoke to a few people in the industry and found that the most common issues involved Google itself producing competition issues for it’s own affiliate network:
1) GMAIL consistently blocked any newsletters that contained affiliate links to Google’s own affiliate network for some unknown reason.
2) It was virtual impossible to buy ads on Google for products on GAN, killing a top possible source for traffic. Why? Probably because they didn’t want to compete with PPC sales?
3) There was no support for other PPC engines, such as Bing as they were seen as competitive and GAN didn’t want to promote media buying via Bing.
Still does this matter? Will anyone actually miss GAN? If an affiliate network closes, and no one notices, does it matter?
Note, for all the people that stole this article, wouldn’t it be nice if you sourced your blogs?
