Google Adsense Just Made A Terrible Mistake

The folks over at Google Adsense just made a big mistake. They just announced that they are changing the referral earnings for the Google Adsense referral program. Note that this only affects those users who are publishing Google Adsense as product on their website. Every other referral program will remain the same. Thank God.

There are several several reasons why they shouldn't have done this but that's for later. SO what are the changes that again only affect the Google Adsense product:

The normal way they paid was this:

* If you refer someone to Google Adsense who makes $5 within 180 days you get a payment of $5.

* If you refer someone to Google 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 a bonus payment of $2000

Which was a very good deal with lots of incentives. But now they are going back to the old system which only pays $100 when the user you referral makes $100. That's it. Imagine what a big step down that is. I mean I can understand if they only removed the $2000 option but they just took away everything. Now tomorrow I am starting the process of removing those referral ads from all of my sites. The problem is there really isn't a suitable replaced anywhere in the relatively new Google Adsense referral system.

But that's not all now they go and limit the amount of people that can use Google Adsense BY REGION! Now only North America, Latin America and Japan users can even use the Google Adsense referral. Imagine how many international publishers that will be cut out from this deal alone.

They've basically effectively killed the Google Adsense referral system. My suspicion is that they are tired of all the users who join and try all those shady ways that are all over the Internet to try to Google Adsense. So they decided to cut it down to regions where they can police any serious breaches. Anyone will do well to remember that even though this is online it's still a business, a well run one at that.

But this in no way excuses them for doing this. Thousands of angry publishers are going to blast Google Adsense on their blogs like ProBlogger is doing. This is just not a good idea.

Thank You