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Some days ago, Google disappointed many publishers outside North America, Latin America and Japan by announcing their new policy which the point was deactivating their referral program. This meant, publishers won’t be earning revenue from referring AdSense to others anymore and what really makes ‘em slapped was they’ve been sending thousands of sign-ups and traffic to AdSense before they were going to be deactivated. This policy made them think that Google hasn’t been being thankful for their past efforts. What’s worse, the policy was decided based on where the referrer comes from. So Google didn’t care if you’re sending thousands of new referrals, as long as you’re outside North America, Latin America or Japan, you were like considered less worthy.

But then it appears that all those protests and open letters made Google re-consider and finally modify the original plan. So, how are things going now?

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You’ll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.

This is certainly better than discriminating based on publishers’ locations. It makes more sense to generate a policy based on the users’ location if they consider users from a certain area tend to behave and make better revenue. Even it’s good news from publishers worldwide, it’ll be so much better to also revive the $5, $250 and $2,000 incentive .

Along with the good news, here comes another policy, which doesn’t sound too good. They’re reducing the referral incentive for Google Pack and Firefox payments for referrals from China.

Finally, we’d like to let you know about upcoming changes to the referrals programs for Google Pack and Firefox:

• Google Pack: Currently, you can earn up to $2 when a user downloads and runs Google Pack for the first time after being referred through your link or button. Starting the third week of February, each successful Pack referral will earn up to $1. This change will apply to all referrals for Google Pack and is independent of user location or publisher location.
• Firefox: We’ll also be reducing payments for Firefox referrals from China during the third week of February. This specific referral payment change will only affect installations from users in China. Again, this is independent of your location as a publisher.

They know that their new policy is making a decrease on publishers’ revenue, but they stated the reasons are to make AdSense effective and sustainable. Maybe by reducing risk on low quality and invalid clicks, it’ll become more valuable for advertisers. Alright, I can deal with that and us bloggers will always open our eyes to remind if such policy ever surfaces in the future.