Just today morning, as I logged into my AdSense account a tiny message flashed below the block that displays your income overview reports.
Exhilarated at the prospect of something new, I clicked on the link and let out a gasp the moment the Referrals screen finished loading. Last I’d seen of the Referrals was those measly 4 or 5 products that were being offered (for which I wrote the Google AdSense Referral Rotator widget for WordPress sidebars). It’s entirely changed now with a massive list of available referrals that can be chosen either on a worldwide or per country basis.
This came as a very big surprise to me, since I’d been away from AdSense for a good while. The same day that I was getting married I somehow managed to get myself banned from AdSense. The reason was invalid clicks. Quite naturally I filed an appeal and reasoned with them that it couldn’t have been me who was producing those clicks. I added that I could furnish additional travel documents if required. That seemed to do the trick. My account got reinstated a couple of days back along with the whole prior balance. Sweet !
Anyway, back to the topic. Google Referrals now come with a horde of choices. They’re divided into categories like Google Products, Automotive, Business, Computer & Electronics etc. The coolest part is that you don’t have to hand-pick and generate the referral code for each individual product anymore. 
You’ve got this Ad Shopping Cart, where you can place your selected products (15 at the most) or add entire categories (10 at a time). In case you add the categories, the best performing ads are automatically displayed.
The code that is generated from your selections keeps rotating the referrals on its own – making my WordPress plug-in sort of redundant. But an overjoyed at the fact that this auto-rotating feature has been integrated into AdSense – it was long overdue. In effect, the random picks of best performing ads maximises the chances of clicks and referral sign-ups by tenfolds thus earning you a whole lot more revenue than earlier on. The referrals are now available in most of the standard Ad Unit formats of AdSense.
From what I figured the new Referrals 2.0 feature is being gradually rolled out to all AdSense publishers. Has it managed to find it’s way into your account yet? And in case you don’t own an AdSense account yet, you can always use the following link to sign-up for one. It’s fast and easy to use, it’s free and it earns you a whole bunch of $$.
I can’t believe you got married. Congratulations! I too haven’t bothered with Adsense Referrals since they were pretty lame and nobody every clicked them. They all just seemed to have too many ways of not paying out. Like the “Google Adsense” product used to be that if your referral earned $100.00 or more in 180 days, you earned the same amount. Unless I misunderstood it from before. Just seemed that it was unlikely that a brand new publisher would earn so much in such a short period of time. The new system for that product is much better and I see that they have a lot more options. Thanks for the heads up.
Hehe.. Had to do it at some point 😀 Glad you dropped by ! True… what you said about the earlier AdSense referrals. The max I got out of a single adsense signup referral was $5. That was coz the referral himself/herself made that much within the first 2 weeks. But that was about it. I’m testing out the new system and will come up with a report in a couple of days. Keeping a watch on what others have to say about this too.