Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their trouble-laden CPC network, Adsense. The new Google advertising program, called the Content Referral Network, will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action, such as purchasing a product or completing a lead form. This differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click on the ad.

What does this mean for web publishers? Will it mean more money or less? Likely more if you know how to take advantage of it. Selling products online as an affiliate marketer takes a different skillset and most importantly a different type of traffic. You can no longer target casual browsers, you need buyers to actually convert sales with the Content Referral Network. It doesn't matter if your site gets 10,000 or 100,000 uniques per day - if they are only there to look at funny videos or post on a forum, they will not convert in a Pay-Per-Action scenario. Those types of sites that tend to have entertainment browsers will be better off sticking with Adsense or other contextual advertising like Yahoo! Publisher.