In AdSense changes the referrals from 90 days to 180, Jen reports on Google.com changing the AdSense affiliate program referral acceptance period from 90 to 180 days. This is after having quietly slashed it down to 90 days at the end of January from the original unlimited period.

She points to this post on the Adsense blog:

You may have noticed today that the time limit for AdSense referrals is now 180 days. Based on the feedback we heard, we agreed that 90 days may not provide enough time for your referred publishers to complete earning $100. Therefore, we decided to double the window. This change is retroactive, so it will also apply to AdSense signups that occurred more than 90 days but less than 180 days ago.

If this supposed to be Google being generous, it isn’t. It’s just less stingy.

The cat was out of the bag as soon as Google cut the accepted referral period to 90 days. There’s only one major reason I can see for reducing it from unlimited.

Money.

By shortening the referral period, Google pay out less commissions.

Simple as that.

The shorter the period, the greater the number of new users Adsense gets through webmaster referrals for which Adsense will never pay a cent (all those who take longer than 180 days to hit the magic $100 earnings mark). This effectively reduces the cost of the referral program and each referred user.

There’s already a field in the database to store the referrer details, so there’s no reason to delete it if the account hasn’t made $100 after 180 days. Besides, hundreds of affiliate programs with far less resources than Google pay out on referrals for years after the initial action.

It’s bad enough it’s not even a decent 2nd tier commission, just a one-off bounty of $100. It could have been a percentage of every ad click, but that would have cost Google a lot more over time.

The fact is, most people who haven’t heard of Adsense and sign up through your website are likely be complete newbies. In that case a good percentage of them may well take far longer than 180 days to get their head around everything, and actually set it all up on a website that get’s enough targeted traffic to make the required $100 for you to get paid your commission.

But they’ll still make money for Google AdSense …

Some other bit’s of interest on Jensense.com in recent weeks: