For publishers who are participating in the AdSense Referrals program, folks at Google AdSense has just sent an email notifying publishers that the program will be shut down effectively on the last week of August.

I believe the main reason why AdSense Referrals program is shutting down is because it’s not performing as good as the measured and it’s best that the team place their effort on the more successful product. If you are using these referral ads, you should take them down, at least before the end of August 2008 as they’ll be no more ads after then.

Here’s Google’s suggestion for referral ads publishers:

• Google Affliate network
• Google AdSense

Here’s a word from Google

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program.