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An email from the AdSense team at Google invited one of SeekingAlpha's analysts to consider hosting CPA ads on his site.

David Jackson posted details about a missive he received from Google after the market closed on June 20th. His article on SeekingAlpha noted how Google wants to provide him "with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis."

Jackson wrote how this would impact one particular competitor in the affiliate marketing arena:

In other words, Google is launching a fully-fledged cost-per-action - otherwise known as affiliate marketing - network.

Let's not mince words. This is Google's ValueClick (VCLK) killer. Google has greater resources than ValueClick, a larger advertiser base, and the advantage of being able to offer publishers a full range of ads based on page views [CPM], clicks [CPC] and now actual purchases or leads [CPA].
That range of ads means a site publisher can pick and choose the most profitable advertising to display on a website. But those CPA ads will not replace Google's mainstay context ads, according to the text of an attachment from the email Jackson received:

These ads will not compete with contextually targeted ads. Instead, they will show across a separate network, the Content Referral network. To place one of these ads on your site, you can set up a new ad unit that supports any of our current ad unit sizes.
CPA is the killer application when it comes to combating click fraud. Since the person who clicks through the ad must perform some specified task on the destination site, the advertiser only pays per action instead of per click.

Google's text also cited some extra flexibility with CPA ads. Even though asking visitors to click an ad is still forbidden by the terms of service, the site publisher can reference the ads in the copy of a site by recommending or encouraging patronage of the advertiser.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.