Google retires AdSense referral program

Due to reasons unknown, the AdSense referral program is being retired at the end of August. It's unclear how popular the referral program actually was, but it's safe to assume it wasn't a huge money-maker for Google. In their official announcement, they alluded to their reasoning behind retiring the program.

We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.

In the announcement, they also suggest a possible replacement for your AdSense referral program called the Google Affiliate Network (formerly DoubleClick Performics). The two programs are almost functionally the same -- advertisers pay-per-action and publishers get a portion of it. It doesn't make sense to support two separate programs that seem to compete, and since they paid billions of dollars for DoubleClick, they might as well use some of their technology going forward.

If you have AdSense referral code on your website right now, Google suggests you replace it with AdSense for Content code before the end of August.

In order to prevent a decrease in your AdSense earnings, we strongly encourage you to replace all referral ad code on your site with AdSense for content ad code prior to the last week of August. You can get this ad code by signing in to your AdSense account, selecting the AdSense Setup tab, and choosing AdSense for content as the product.

Do you use AdSense Referrals? If so, how successful was it? Will you be giving the Google Afilliate Network a try, or will you put other ads in their place?