‘AdSense Referrals’ gets dumped

Today we received an email from Google stating that ‘AdSense Referrals’ is ‘retiring’ from Google’s AdSense service. Something that actually wasn’t completely unexpected. Our experience with it showed us that it was really fairly weak (especially compared to the standard you expect from Google services). It was a sort of ClickBank clone except not just for digital products. It meant that instead of earning a few cents/pence from a click using the standard AdSense, you would instead earn a percentage of the sale. This means you would earn less often, but when you do it would be a larger profit. I think webmasters tried it, realised they weren’t earning as much and stopped. The post on the AdSense blog stated,

“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.”

Google asks that all users who are currently using the referral program remove the code from their websites. The code won’t work and everything will be removed at the end of August.

The profitability of ‘Referrals’ is unknown by us, but it is fairly obvious that it wasn’t profitable. We all know, Google loves profit!