Domain tasting is the practice of registrants to use the five-day “grace period” at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated generic top level domain to test the domain name’s marketability. This practice is one of the reasons why we are having a hard time finding free domain names suitable for us and our business. Many Adsense publishers are making profits using this practice.

According to reports circulating on the web, Google will stop allowing “domain tasters” to register a domain, put Adsense on it for a couple days to make profits and then drop the domain name before the “five-day period” expires. If this information is correct, Google’s decision could stop all “domain tasting” in its tracks. Without the financial incentive from Adsense, it is likely that these domain tasters will need to revise their strategy to continue making profit from domain tasting.

Google announced earlier some changes in their previous announcement to discontinue the referral program for publishers living outside North America, Latin America and Japan. Google may have received tremendous amount of complaints about their previous announcement or they were afraid that new players will benefit from this kind of program after they discontinued their referral system and eventually affect their adsense program

From the official Google Adsense Blog:

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.

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.

Well, this is a good news for publishers living outside North America, Latin America and Japan who are earning great amount of money using adsense referral program.

From the official adsense blog website:

- 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.

 

Soon, you’ll no longer see the option to create a referral button for AdSense in your account, although existing buttons will display as normal. This specific referral type will then be retired during the last week of January - any users who meet the conversion criteria (reaching $100 in earnings within 180 days of sign-up and removing all payment holds) before the change will generate earnings of $250 for the referring publishers. Any conversions which occur after this change is made will not be recorded in your account. You may wish to begin replacing any existing referrals promoting AdSense with referrals for another product or an AdSense for content unit.

 

We appreciate your support of this referral product, and hope it won’t cause you any inconvenience.

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If you are a publisher living outside of the locations mentioned above, then you cannot participate in the Adsense referral program anymore. Yes dude! it doesn’t matter if your audience live in the locations mentioned, its not about the quality of your blog anymore nor the content of your website, its about your location.

The worst part of it is the last part of their statement, “We appreciate your support of this referral product, and hope it won’t cause you any inconvenience.” Won’t cause any inconvenience???? Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!