Refferals

You may have seen our recent post about the upcoming changes to referrals promoting AdSense. Since we made this announcement, we've received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher. We've carefully considered your feedback, and have decided to modify the original plan.

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You'll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You'll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.

The option to add a referral unit for AdSense will reappear in your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.


We've also heard from a number of you that you're no longer seeing recent AdSense referral earnings in your account. Please be assured that this is a display error -- past conversions have not been removed from your account. Our engineers are working hard to resolve this issue quickly.

Finally, we'd like to let you know about upcoming changes to the referrals programs for Google Pack and Firefox:

* Google Pack: Currently, you can earn up to $2 when a user downloads and runs Google Pack for the first time after being referred through your link or button. Starting the third week of February, each successful Pack referral will earn up to $1. This change will apply to all referrals for Google Pack and is independent of user location or publisher location.

* Firefox: We'll also be reducing payments for Firefox referrals from China during the third week of February. This specific referral payment change will only affect installations from users in China. Again, this is independent of your location as a publisher.

We understand that these changes may decrease revenue for some of you currently participating in these referrals programs. While it's our goal to help publishers earn as much as possible with the AdSense program, like any other referrals advertiser, we’re constantly evaluating our campaigns to make them effective and sustainable.

Again, thank you for your feedback and support of the referrals program.





Labels: AdSense features, Earnings/Reports

Engaging users with policy-compliant images and video
As it's becoming easier and easier to embed videos and pictures on websites, many publishers are now enhancing their current text content with relevant videos and photos. We wholeheartedly support adding these different forms of content to improve the user experience on your site -- hey, we like watching entertaining YouTube videos too! But here's a friendly reminder about keeping our program policies in mind when you choose video and image content for your site.

Before posting videos or pictures on a page with Google ads, put yourself in an advertiser's position and consider whether you would want to have your ad displayed on the page. If your content might potentially be seen as offensive or disturbing, an advertiser may not be comfortable running their ads on that page. Here are a few specific types of content that you can check for:

* Adult or mature: Includes, but is not limited to, images and videos containing sexual activity, full nudity, and lewd poses. Please review this recent post to determine whether your content might fall into this category.
* Violent or gory: Can include images and videos of street-fighting, people hurting each other, or gruesome accidents and their victims.
* Culturally insensitive or hate speech: Includes content promoting racial intolerance or advocating against a specific individual, group, or organization.

Also, keep in mind that publishers may not place AdSense ads on pages involved in the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. Unauthorized copyrighted materials include music, movies, images, or any other copyrighted material that the publisher does not own or license from the copyright owner.

The list above is by no means exhaustive, since there are always some borderline cases which will feature content that may be tame to one person but offensive to another. If you're uncertain about specific pictures or videos, we recommend that you err on the side of caution and refrain from placing this content on pages containing Google ads. In addition, if you host a site with user-generated content, we ask that you continually monitor your network to ensure that ads don't appear alongside the types of content