The day has finally come to bid goodbye to our friend Adsense Referrals. This is an ode to one of the best referral programs I’ve ever seen and a call to prepare for the future. Adsense referrals were a favorite of every blogger, webmaster or anyone who wanted to monetize their efforts. Notice that I used the term efforts and not website. This is because not everyone monetized their website. Developers and programmers monetize their work. Most of them are a part of the open source community who spend their nights coding and debugging software to provide it free. And referrals were one resource that helped them support their work, host their site and pay their bills.
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
-Niels Bohr
And of all referral products Google Pack was the popular pick. One conversion could bring you up to two dollars. Some time earlier in 2008 Google revised the payments and cut it by half. But it still remained a favorite. Ten conversions a month would pay the web-hosting bills. But things were generally better than that. Earnings were good and the referrals were a motivation for everyone.
Early today I noticed one of my sites and found the Google Referrals were missing. Google don’t work weekends so it was only they switch them off on Friday. It’s time now to update your site. If you were aware of the upcoming change hopefully you have experimented, are prepared and would even have setup your site already. If not it is not too late. You could sign up for one of these affiliate programs.
I like Chitika and it is one of the programs that does well. Google Affiliate Network is actually the Google acquired Doubleclick. Getting into the program is not easy. My request was turned down twice before I got in. And once I got in I found there weren’t many products that I could refer on Binary Turf. Again its your decision; you will have to experiment and find out what works for your particular site. But one thing we all will remember is that it will be some time before we see a contender becoming as popular as the Google Referral program. We’ll miss you Referrals…
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