More Changes To AdSense Referrals
Looks like the general outcry over changes to the AdSense referrals program has had an effect:
Hello AdSense publisher,
We are writing to give you an important follow-up to the changes we announced earlier this month to the referrals to AdSense program. Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.
Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.
We’d also 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 will 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. As with referrals to AdSense, this is independent of your location as a publisher.
We understand that these changes may decrease revenue for some of you currently participating in these referrals programs. While it is our goal to help publishers earn as much as possible with the AdSense program, like any other referrals advertiser, we are constantly evaluating our campaigns to make them effective and sustainable.
Again, thank you for your feedback and support of the referrals program.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
Making the referral validity dependent on where the potential referree (the page visitor) is instead of where the AdSense publisher is located makes a lot more sense, since presumably there’s a correlation between where new publishers are located and how well Google fares from them. They still haven’t said why they’ve made these changes in the first place, one can only assume that they’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that they’re losing money due to fraud from certain areas of the world. Less money means fewer espressos and other goodies for their overworked developers, so we can’t have that!
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3 Responses to “More Changes To AdSense Referrals”
Did you notice the line used for Firefox referrals “As with referrals to AdSense, this is independent of your location as a publisher.”?
They clearly say it doesn’t depend on the publicher location but they done mention the visitor location. Do Firefox referrals money varies by the location of the visitors?
regards
Shivanand Sharma
Yes, but that’s always been the case, it’s not new. The payouts for Firefox (the Google toolbar), Picasa, and other Google products has generally varied based on where the downloader is.
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