I have placed the banner directly above my adsense units on my website http://www.usedmac.ca The thought behind this is visitors will be attracted to the Adsense banner and possibly click the ads.

Is this against the T.O.S.? I think it may be walking a fine line but I am interested to what the CTR will turn out to be?

As far as who else to refer? There are plenty, believe me. I referred an associate a few months ago, got nothing for it except his gratitude. I referred one of my affiliates recently also that claims to have 100,000 uniques a week or so, but never had AdSense on his pages even though he had lots of other advertising banners. Got nothing for that one either. And as was said before, there are new web site owners coming on board every day in droves.

Reminds me of what I thought when I joined the eBay affiliate program, with 70 million registered users or so already, who is there to refer (especially considering eBay is a household word and people go straight there as soon as they buy a computer, rather than surfing through other sites first to find an affiliate link). Yet I still get signups every month through my links.

You are correct in pointing out that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I can envision Google promoting their other products using affiliates. Gmail is a good example. If Google were to offer incentives for signing up people to use Gmail, that would be a launching point in the battle against Yahoo and AOL.

Here’s what annoys me. This will be my first month with Chitika, so I don’t know what audited revenue will be like, but I assume from what Darren said about his first months from them, that I may lose 10% of my earnings, give or take. That’s fine. I will still get more than $20 from them. And they will send it to my PayPal account this month sometime because I am over the $10 threshhold.

Google, on the other hand, has a threshold of $100 for payment to occur. God knows how long before I see a payment from you AdSense. (For one thing, the AdSense targeting on my site has gone to crap this month for some reason, and despite implementing every idea I’ve come across to try to improve it, I’ve only managed to do so marginally, but that’s another story.) Anyway, I’m sure it saves Google a ton of money not to have to pay the little guys who never get to $100 and give up on the idea of trying to make money on the net, but really… it’s still wrong. They still displayed the ad and got a click, which Google certainly got paid for. There’s no reason why they should hold their money for so long. I thought one of the tenets of Google’s business was “Don’t be evil”? Well, I feel like this policy is evil.

Just thought I’d share.

Cheers.

your not allowed to do what darren has done in his site with the “revenue streams” it influences people to click on it.

Even though I use referral programs, what worries me is the life-expectancy of the click. Just because Joe Blow clicks on your referral, how do you know if he decides to sign up next week, you’ll still get the credit?

Incentives

Some of this section has been reworded to include “referral buttons”, and the following has been added:

Publishers are also not permitted to use deceptive or unnatural means to draw attention to or incite clicks on referral buttons.

“Who is left to Refer?” – non-English speaking countries. Here in Hungary for example there are almost no sites running AdSense. No wonder they started with all the supported languages I think.