Well, its over 6 months now singe Google closed their affiliate network and I gave my initial thoughts on their reasonings. Interestingly, when looking at the analysis of gan.doubleclick - their tracking domain - in Publisher-Discovery data, there are still over 37,000 websites linking in (from 44,000 in March 13).
That gives raise to a few potential insights:
1 - Google's 'Affiliate Network' was a pretty hollow entity - if there were only 7,000 affiliate sites who considered it worth swapping their links, there was likely to be very little revenue generated by the overall network;
2 - If the above is true, then we can draw a conclusion that Google closed the network on a very poor analysis of the overall affiliate market; and
3 - By leaving the domain live, Google have created 37,000 sites with over 1.6M 404 errors:
...a bit of a lost opportunity assuming there is any traffic running through those domains.
Even more bizarre is that a fresh index on December 8th shows 790 new linking domains - with GAN links in them.
I'd be interested to see your thoughts or observations.
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