Online Money Dot.com

Google made an announcement yesterday that it will be making drastic cuts to the Adsense affiliate program payouts. Up until now, when someone we signed-up for Adsense made their first $5 in 180 days, we would also receive $5. Additionally, if the same publisher passed the $100 mark during that time frame, we would receive another $250 payment.

With the changes announced yesterday, the $5 payment will disappear, and the $250 payment will be reduced to only $100. But I haven´t gotten to the worst of the news.

If you live outside North America, Latin America, or Japan, the Adsense referral program will end completely!

This won´t have much of an impact for me, since after I changed WordPress themes, I almost completely stopped promoting Google Referrals, but this is a very successful affiliate program for a lot of publishers. Darren Rowse was particularly upset, calling this move by Google “short sighted” and “stupid”. I agree with him.

The thing I find most strange however, is that Google is discrimination based on the publisher´s location, and not traffic origin, site authority, or language. Does it really matter if you are based in Australia, when the vast majority of your traffic comes from the US? You would think that if there is an internet company that can monitor and segment all this information, Google would be it.

But hey, its their “toy” and they only let you “play” if they want.