Google Changes Advertising Policy – Referrals to Stop from August End

There would be impending changes to Google’s Advertising Programs. The change is to happen in last week of August 2008 & beginning late August 2008 all Referral Advertising programs would be discontinued completely .

Publishers will no longer be required to promote Google Products or any of the Referral Ad programs. AdSense referrals feature will be retired for AdWords advertiser products as well.

Google would serve Adsense for content & DoubleClick Performics Affiliate.

Although Google does not publish any data on how much publishers have been earning from the Referral programs, Google mentioned that it was necessary to discontinue the program to focus on newer advertising tools.

The Help note published reads "We are currently reevaluating the Google Referrals program to ensure that it is providing the best possible monetization opportunity for our publishers as well as meeting the needs of Google. At this time, we have suspended the Google Referrals program."

To prevent any loss of publishers’ earnings, Google suggests that publishers of Google Referral Ads replace all referral ad code on your sites with AdSense for content ad code prior to the last week of August.

Reference : Adsense Help Desk