It is Over! Google Officially Retired Referrals! My Referral Ads No longer display! The Termination of Google Referrals

No More sign ups! No more Daily Conversions, No More funky Banners, No more Google Referrals! Google is no longer providing Referrals as part of their Google Adsense program. What are the alternatives to Google Referrals?

If you are not familiar with Google Adsense, this may not be in your radar. But those of you who are Adsense users, you will be missing a big chunk of your daily income because the Referrals Program is terminated to make way for Google Affiliate Network. As of today, millions of web sites are no longer showing Referral ads as the code to show the ads no longer works! If you have visited Somchat.com before, you would have noticed the big banner reading "Get Your Web SIte Free, Easy 3 steps" from Wetpaint.com. I tell you, that made me money everyday as they paid a good change per sign up!

With millions of web sites showing Google Adsense, many web surfers will notice the difference as the web will probably be faster a little bit due to the following reasons.
The referrals program from Google was mostly Banner oriented. This means web sites normally showed a large graphical banner, sometimes a flash banner or animated gif for a referral ad.
The fact that millions of web sites showed Google Adsense Referral banners meant that millions more web pages within those web sites also displayed the same banners. Basically, Every web sites, out of those millions of adsense enabled sites, had at least more than one web page showing the same ad banner. When that many pages are no longer showing the ads, you can imagine how much traffic bandwidth is freed up.

The Alternative to Google Adsense Referrals.

Apparently, Google is trying hard to make up for the lost revenue incurring from their Referral retirement. To offset this loss, Google introduced long ago, the Google Affiliate Network (GAN). This is where millions of web publishers sell Google partner products on their web sites and take a piece of the pie. Although this is an excellent source of income for web sites with large traffic, (i.e hundreds of thousands of visits per day to millions of visits per day), web sites averaging fewer than ten thousand visits per day will likely to see that sales are hard to come by. And as a result will not collect enough commissions. In contrast, the Referral program made the majority of small time web sites conversions so money went to almost every Google Adsense subscriber's account that used referrals.

So, although the GAN is an alternative to Google Referrals it is still not nearly as profitable to less popular web sites, as the Google Referrals was.

Switching to More text and graphical based Google's Adsense for Content links.

Now that a large space will be available on publisher's web sites, where the Referral banners used to be displayed, many publishers will be replacing them with textual links from Google Adsense for Content. Adsense for Content will now become the primary source of showing Google Adwords subscribers links on web sites. So, expect to see more links on the web sites you visit! Either that, or Google will display banners instead of links through the Adsense for Content where clicks will be counted as supposed to sign ups and conversions from Google Referrals.

To every Google Adsense publisher! I say, Good luck to your financial success, because Google's decision to retire Adsense Referrals will definitely pick your pocket a bit.