I haven’t seen this announced publicly anywhere, so I will go ahead and announce it for my readers:
Google AdSense Referral program is being discontinued on the last week of August. The good news? They are now offering up a new affiliate program involving recent buy DoubleClick. The bad news? It is only for US traffic.
Google suggests:
* Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.
* Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create
and save all reports related to the referrals program on your
desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign
information
They then go on to state this is needed for long term to help develop Google AdSense’s quality and magnetization for their users.
More information about the new Google Affiliate program.
Written: Jul 1, 2008
Tags: affiliates, google adsense
Tedd
July 1, 2008 @ 6:52 am | Reply
Where are you getting your information from? I would like to pass this information along, but I will not do so until I can get some kind of confirmation. Please email me.
Gary R. Hess
July 1, 2008 @ 11:08 am | Reply
The information is from an email I received from the Google AdSense team.
Dennis Edell
July 2, 2008 @ 5:42 am | Reply
I should open my Google mail more often. Although I ditched adsense long ago.
Grant
July 4, 2008 @ 4:37 pm | Reply
I don’t think this will matter to most people… I never made any money off of adsense referrals.
Gary R. Hess
July 5, 2008 @ 12:50 am | Reply
When Google Referrals first started, I sold quite a few eBooks. However, the advertisers budgets went out too quickly.
The problem was, they treated the referrals exactly like regular AdSense ads when it came to funds. There were sellers allowed to give $15 for an action, yet only have a $20 budget. Doesn’t that seem a bit weird to anyone else?
So after selling an eBook or widget, the advertiser would get free advertising if the person who had the ad on their website didn’t select ‘performance ads’ (which many didn’t if they knew what they were doing). So what ended up happening was publishers getting completely pissed off at Google and Google doing nothing about it.
Another problem that occured was advertisers being able to set the PPA to $0.00. So if the ad showed up on the best performing (which it sometimes did because the action would be a simple click) the publisher was again screwed.
Now, Google did try to fix this a few times, so instead, the advertisers would change it to $0.01 or $0.02 etc. and still land in best performing. And would they care? Hell no, because the same clicks would cost them $0.20 in AdWords PPC.
Referrals did NOTHING for the most part for publishers and did everything for advertisers.
With all that happened, it was virtually impossible to write an article about a product. How could one really go after referral ads when they couldn’t be gauranteed payment? It was ridiculous.
Anyway, with all the complaints it was still OK in some cases. It was easy access to PPA and just about anyone could be a seller, meaning HUGE inventory. And the Google products/Firefox was also a good deal.
Puneet
July 10, 2008 @ 12:22 am | Reply
yea i too heard about this on another blog ..
it was a good source though … but wat now …