Why did Google AdSense stop the Referrals program?

Almost every webmaster which used AdSense at least once, know about the AdSense Referrals. Now we can forget about it.

A while ago, Google announced on the Official AdSense Blog that they retire the AdSense Referrals program. Many were revolted by the announcement as Google did not provide a good alternative for the AdSense users. Well, it did provide, but it was invitation based and released as a public beta.

But let’s see why did they retire this program.

The answer is very simple. Earlier this year Google purchased Doubleclick, one of the greatest ad- and affiliate-networks. As soon as the purchase was completed, suddenly Doubleclick stopped it’s ad-network service. Why? Google already has an ad network, AdSense, so having two ad networks would have be pointless.
But what about the referrals? Referrals were practically affiliate programs, and let’s be honest, they didn’t work as good as Google thought initially. They didn’t pay well for the AdSense publishers, the lead tracking was quite hard to achieve on the advertisers end. I said before the referrals were practically affiliate programs. Doubleclick already had it’s own named Doubleclick Performics, an extremely well designed affiliate program, it was and is easy to use both for the publishers and the advertisers. The only problem with it at the moment is that they don’t support flash ads yet, which would be cool to have.

So to answer the initial question, the AdSense Referrals program was retired because the Google-Doubleclick fusion brought a much better solution, which has been named Google Affiliate Network. It is a refurbished version of the Doubleclick Performics but its simplicity both on the UI and idea level makes it probably the best program around the net.

To subscribe to the Google Affiliate Network, visit its Official Website.

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