We've heard your feedback about the availability of video units, so we've expanded the languages and geographies where they're supported. We've added French, German, and Spanish to our list of supported languages, and also Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico to the list of supported countries. To help you determine whether you'll be able to use video units, consider these two questions:
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm PDT. While you won't be able to log in to your account during these hours, the maintenance won't affect your ad targeting or delivery and your earnings will still be tracked in your reports like always.
To celebrate the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, here's the start time of the maintenance in past, present, and future host cities for the Summer Olympics:
Montreal - 1pm Saturday
London - 6pm Saturday
Athens - 8pm Saturday
Beijing - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday
We hope the maintenance period will give you an opportunity to catch a few matches and root for your home country!
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Today AdSense announced that they are drawing their ‘Referrals’ program to a close and are relaunching a new Google affiliate network. In actual effect the new affiliate network is not ‘new’ - but a rebranded version of DoubleClick’s Performics Affiliate Network which they acquired in March.
This is news that many of us expected - particularly since Google bought DoubleClick earlier in the year. It’s also not surprising as most publishers that I know have had very little success with the Referrals program within AdSense. In fact I’m one of the only people that I know who made much from it - and that almost dried up when they changed the referrals program for AdSense.
If You Promote AdSense Referrals Products…
If you’re a blogger promoting some kind of AdSense Referrals product it’s time to remove the ad and replace it with something else. You can still run the ads but they’ll stop working in the last week of August.
It is not clear whether the referrals that you’ve made that have not converted will also become void in the last week of August also. This is something I’d like to see AdSense clarify as some of their programs have quite long lead times for those that you refer to ‘convert’ and therefore to earn you money.
Google Affiliate Network
The new Google Affiliate Network does not something that everyone will be able to use. They say that they are targeting sites with largely US based traffic - I’m yet to see any clarification on how they’ll be filtering publishers, whether there is a traffic based minimum to get in etc. Time will tell as publishers start applying. At present I know that Performics has accepted me as a publisher (I was previously using it) so it’s not too hard to get into I hope!
No More Google Affiliate Products
Those of you promoting ‘Google Products’ through the current ‘Referrals’ system should know that there are no plans at this point to have these products available to promote through the new affiliate network. They may come later but my sources at Google say that these programs are coming to an end and there will be no immediate way to make money by sending them new AdSense publishers, AdWords advertisers etc.
Two Australian AdSense team members, Mel Ann and Tim, have put together a good introductory guide to optimizing AdSense.
It’s not advanced but if you’re just starting out with AdSense it’s worth a watch.
Yaro Starak has just published an audio interview with one of his former students (and now a coach) from BlogMastermind Alborz Fallah.
Alborz is behind a car blog here in Australia - a blog that has enabled him to grow his blog to a point where it’s been valued at over $5 million - have a partnership with a major media company, take on investors and more. It’s pretty impressive since he only started blogging in 2006!
This guy is getting luxury cars to review, is competing with the biggest car sites in this country and employs 6 full time staff.
Here’s the interview (there’s a transcript too) - it’s a great story with tips on writing content, finding readers and more.
PS: having just listened to this for the 2nd time what shines through to me is Alborz’s passion for his topic and his believe in writing amazing content. I think these things are central in what he’s achieved - great stuff