New Google AdSense Referral Program

Google AdSense finally has a referral program worth promoting. The new public program, which seems to have launched today, pays $100 after your referral earns their first $100. They also pay $1 for every Firefox with Google toolbar download you referrer. This money is credited to your account and paid out during your next payout period.

I do recall some sort of limited referral program that was only available to a few sites a while ago, but now it's open to all. It looks like they really want to quickly ramp up the number of sites in their content network. Considering how much money these sites generate for Google, I'm not surprised.

There's now a new tab in the account center for creating referral buttons, but at the moment the options are limited to white graphical buttons. I hope in the near future, they allow publisher to customize the colors or even provide text based links. I'm kind of surprised they didn't do this to begin with, especially since I'm sure they know how well people click on text links as opposed to graphical banners.