Google AdSense Referrals will end the last week of August 2008!
[Note by Philipp: Also thanks to Haochi and Justin Pfister, who had posted this around the same time! Haochi writes: "I guess third party referral buttons aren't working too well after all."] |
Hello,
Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense
Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate
your patience during this transition and here are some alternative
options to consider:
* Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
* AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.
If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google
products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals
code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:
* 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
Why is this happening?
We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional
questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882
Sincerely.
The Google AdSense Team
--------------------[...]--------------------------
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announcement to update you about the retirement of an AdSense
feature.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043 |
At lest in my case google referrer program was horrible. Amazon, CJ, eBay... everything performed by rate of 10 or more better then that program.
One of bad things is they label it as "google referrer ads" but it looked like google ads/just different erasing suspicions.
There was some rumor that cost per click advertisement blocks goes up when you use one referrer block but I guess it is/was not true. |
The question is its own answer and also answer to the question, "Why is Google dropping the program." Like all the other dropped programs, this just wasn't worth any more development time or advertising space. PPC text ads are Google's pretty-much-one-trick-revenue-pony, end of story. |
I can say that in my case the referral program has been quite good for me. I'm going to be very sorry to lose the revenue I've been generating. However, most of the revenue came from referrals to Google products (Google Earth) and Firefox. |
I knew this was coming bu man it sucks. I am making between $1000-$1200/month from Firefox referrals. Hopefully the Performics tool will have something similar I can use.
dm |
I have made $0.20 from Firefox referrals. |
Roger, what did you do with all that cash? :) |
Firefox referrals were my best-performing advertising income source for a year or two, but I hadn't been able to sustain that rate anyway. |
FireFox referrals have been what's been keeping my portfolio of websites free for my members, this will have big consequences on me. I'm not sure what I'll do now...
Oh well... It's the end of some good days, maybe they'll bring something new in to replace it...
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I thought that Adsense for referrals would be a great idea, but for some reason the ads haven't been performing well on my sites either. I've got hardly any clicks, no matter where I placed the unit. Sounds like Google flopped here. I just can't understand how to get accepted into the affiliate network properly with my blogspot blog.
[signature removed] |
Does anyone know if they plan on integrating referrals into the Performics/Doubleclick interface?
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