Google Launches Pay-Per-Action Beta, and somebody owes me $5

those of you who know me, know how much i HATE saying i told you so... cough, cough.  (altho to be accurate, analytics more than checkout is assisting the connection to CPA/PPA, but payment will play a significant role in CPA before long).  anyway, it's here:

Official Google announcements:

• Inside Adwords: Google Pay-Per-Action beta test
• Inside Adsense: now accepting applications for new referrals beta

Blogger commentary:

• Mike Arrington / TechCrunch
• Andy Beal / Marketing Pilgrim
• Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0
• Joe / TechDirt
• Andrew Goodman / Traffick
• Jeremy Liew / Lightspeed
• Rob Hof / BusinessWeek Tech Beat
• Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land
• others on TechMeme 1 2 3 4
  

and my crystal ball from the past year:

• Google Checkout as Trojan Horse into CPA
• Yahoo should do CPA before Google does
• why Google is hedging against click-fraud & spam
• Yahoo, eBay, Amazon could all beat Google if they did CPA
• Seeking Alpha on Google testing CPA
  

so like i said: somebody owes me five bucks, or at least a World Domination Coordinator t-shirt.

Comments

[noah kagan]

Put it on my tab;)

[Damon Billian]

Ya think one of the other players would've jumped at it first? Sheesh...

[adam]

What I don't get is, how is this such a huge leap in thinking? It seems to me that CPA is the 4th blade after you're bored selling razors with 3 blades.

I have this sneaking suspicion that Google was sitting on their CPA plans until Panama was released...just to keep Yahoo off balance for as long as possible. That's what Y! gets for playing catchup.

What I'd like to know is, why hasn't Google checkout been more successful?

[Dave Nielsen]

Sounds like a skunkworks project I proposed at PayPal back in 2004 (aka 'paywords'). Some things just take a while for the big fellas to catch on to.