AdSense Referral Policy Change - Foreign Publishers Got Slapped

Jan 2008 | Category: News and Rumors

Enjoy the article!

AdSense through their blog announced changes to their referral program that now becomes less lucrative to publishers. If you’re in North America, Latin America, or Japan, the pricing structure for AdSense referrals is changing. A year ago, AdSense changed the referral comission structure like this:

If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $5 within 180 days you get $5
If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $100 within 180 days you get $250
If you refer 25 people who make $100 within a 180 day period you get $2000

Then they decided to conclude this experiment and return to the original pricing structure which has a comission calculation as follows:

If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $100 within a 180 day period you get $100

That’s it! No more incentive to refer small publishers and referring a group of publishers.

Like if that’s not enough, read this:

If you’re outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired.

You don’t read it wrong, no more AdSense referrals comission for those outside North America, Latin America and Japan!

This upsets a lot of bloggers with huge traffic from the USA but operate their blog from outside America (includes successfuls Indians, Germans, Aussies and Brits). The reason is, the policy excludes publishers not based on the topic, nor the quality, nor the visitor’s location, but from your location as a publisher. Unless they have tons of very good reasons behind this policy, I think disabling publishers’ commission based on their origin sounds ~~racist~~ locationist.

Update: Google is compromising this policy after getting reactions.

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