Google AdSense blog is funny. Well, it’s the international community who is hilarious. The latest update from the Inside AdSense team at Google comes in the form of clarification for what is the pound key? Apparently the pound key or # symbol is too complicated for Google’s international advertisers. They think that the pound key is the £ symbol designating British currency. Apparently, this misconception is so widespread that the AdSense blog had to write about it to its 18,000 subscribers. Hopefully this clears up any confusion that people might have regarding how to give their money to the Google advertising machine.
Google starts off geo-centric AdSense referrals. A few days ago Google AdSense team announced a few changes to their referral program where you can earn money by referring AdSense to your visitors and if they sign up you get a cut of their earnings. According to the original announcement, if you live in North America, Latin America and Japan you could refer AdSense to any user of any country. 
But now you can only earn if the user who signs up for AdSense is located in North America, Latin America and Japan. In simple terms it means if you are in USA and you referred a user in India to sign up for AdSense then you won’t make any referral money. This does not affect TeqEdge because I run other ad networks who seem to be paying more. But the AdSense change will affect a lot of other webmasters and bloggers because of the popularity of the program. Beginning on the last week of January 2008 AdSense running websites will have to decide to keep running AdSense referrals or not. From Google Inside AdSense blog…
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.
Other new changes in AdSense include you earn $2 if you refer a new user to Google Pack. Google Pack is a combo software suite provided Google which includes Google Earth, Norton Security Scan, Google Desktop, Firefox with Google Toolbar, Adobe Reader, Skype, StarOffice, Google Toolbar for IE, Spyware Doctor, Picasa, Google Photos Screensaver, Google Talk and RealPlayer. This deal will go on until second week of February 2008. After that the commission will drop to $1 per referral. Firefox referral program will also change beginning at the same time. But this will only affect for users that you refer only in China. Google team has not announced the new pricing structure for Firefox referrals.
Google AdSense has raised an army of online advisers who throw money at publishers to put their ads on their website. But a new theme of advertising is gaining momentum – these are Widget Ads. These types of ads are seen on several small sites and are favored by many because of their high payout rates and interactive design. It almost entices the user to play with the ad block and hopefully click on it. The larger publishers are leaning towards banner, text and graphical ads and I have not come across any large site running widget ads.
Widgetbucks is a good example of this type of ad. I looked more closely at Widgetbucks previously as an alternative to Adsense. Widgets have been used so far primarily as a portal to important information that you aggregate from a variety of sources. But the implementation of ads in this format is fairly new and more online publishers are sure to follow the growing trend and start offering the widget format in their ads.
Source: CNET News