This is a very brief posting to let all you Google AdSense users know that soon the AdSense Referrals program will be closed. I think Google sent out an e-mail to members explaining why, but if you did not get it checkout this posting on the AdSense official blog:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/06/were-retiring-adsense-referrals.html
I don’t think referrals will be that sorely missed (at least not by me) as they weren’t that terribly effective. In other words they just don’t make you that much money, especially when compared to pay-per-click AdSense. If you compare AdSense Referrals to say for example ClickBank then AdSense Referrals stands no chance – ClickBank’s commission rates are huge! The largest referral reward I got was like $3 and that after I think 30-50 clicks. In other words the conversion rates were very low most of the time.
The interesting question is if now Google will let us use more than 3 “regular” AdSense banner on the same page. I, like many people, maximized my ad space by making sure I have 3 regular AdSense banners and 1 AdSense Referrals banner, but now that referrals are gone does it mean that they will let us use 4 regular banners on one page? I kind of doubt it, but it remains to be seen. Also I’m excited to see what Google comes up with next. Their AdSense for mobile phones and youtube video have proven to be very neat ideas and effective money generators too, so you gotta ask yourself, what will the geniuses at Google come up with next.
Oh, and here is the date by which AdSense Referrals will be retired, so make sure you remove all referral ads before the last week of August.
“Referrals will be retired during the last week of August 2008.”