As many of you would already know, the Adsense referral payment system was today changed and brought back to the old module. According to the Adsense Blog, this is how things will be from now on.

About a year ago, as an experiment, we changed the pricing structure for AdSense referrals so that when a user you referred to the program earned $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you would also earn $5. When that publisher earned $100 within 180 days and removed all payment holds, you’d receive $250. We have decided to conclude this experiment and return to the original pricing structure. As a result, we’ll soon no longer be offering the $5 bonus or $2000 bonus, and the payout for referring a user who generates $100 with AdSense in the first 180 days will return to $100.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Google has decided that foreign webmasters are useless and have therefore discontinued the service for anyone living outside North America, Latin America, and Japan . This is the most outrageous thing I think Adsense has ever done, and I cannot for a moment understand the logic behind it. This is an absolute joke and I cannot see why they’d apply such drastic measure to their service.

- If you’re outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired.

For publishers not located in any of the three regions detailed above, we’ll soon be retiring referrals promoting AdSense. We’ve found that this referral product has not performed as well as we had hoped in these regions. Again, please keep in mind that you can still generate referrals for the other products listed under the ‘Referrals’ section of your AdSense Setup tab.

This means I’ll be forced to drop Adsense, since I’m currently residing in Australia. I can to some extent understand the reasoning behind the changes in payment structure, but I’m shocked at how far they’ve gone with this. Other Australian bloggers have been affected by these changes including Darren Rowse.

As a publisher who blogs from Australia but who has a blog on a niche topic that relates perfectly to AdSense and which has the vast majority of it’s traffic from the USA (and which has consistently referred publishers to AdSense that have converted at the $100 in 180 range) I cannot understand the reasoning for this change.

I’m just one example (I’m the example I know best) and a quick look at my stats shows me that I’ve displayed AdSense referral ads close to 20 million times. I’ve sent them tens of thousands of visitors and have been responsible for thousands of sign ups. I cannot even begin to imaging how much money those signups have made AdSense - yet today they’re telling me that they don’t feel that that kind of evangelism for them is worthwhile paying for?

Google - you’re a bunch of absolute idiots who cannot obviously be bothered to look after your existing publisher base by employing simple filtering methods instead of going as far as banning entire countries from your service. The only thing this can possibly do is drive seas of publishers to Google’s competitors - who are the only ones who will benefit in my opinion. Good riddance Adsense - thanks for the ride.