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Or “Happy New Year” to our valued alien publishers. I’d merely popped my head round the door from Christmas / New Year / Visitors and read Google’s “Dear John” post on Upcoming referrals changes on the Inside AdSense blog, but Shoemoney’s headline (recycled above) more accurately summed it up.
As Darren Rowse AKA Problogger says, “It’s got nothing to do with your audience’s location, the topic you write about, the quality of your blog or any other factor - it’s about where you blog from.” When Google announced:
If you’re outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired.
This makes utterly no sense to me at all and, gives certain countries an unfair advantage over others. I happen to be British, living in Spain, but despite the fact that more than 80% of y’all (that is visitors to most of my sites) being located in the U. S. of A., I will now be excluded from yet another program (or part of it).
The idea of working online should mean that I can work from any damn place.
Does this make me mad? Yessiree. Did I ever make any money from Google referrals? Nope, but that’s not the point. 
Google, we are not amused.
Adsense Slaps Foreign Webmasters in the Face
Mind you, I do find it a tad ironic (someone please tell Darren) that I have not been able to access any of B5 Media’s sites (of which Problogger is one) for some months now. It seems that they’re using IP blocking and, since I seldom have the time to post comments or trackbacks (maybe once or twice in total) personally, this would appear to indicate that it is my entire Spanish ISP that is blocked from visiting their network. Since my ISP is what used to be Spain’s national phone company and only provider of physical phone lines in this country, potentially, that excludes rather a lot of “foreigners” too …
This is just downright discrimination to me. I may be in the US but what they are doing just ain’t right.
I need to dig out the link, but since this, Google changed the plan again. If they were responding to the criticism, that’s good. But now, if I remember correctly, people outside the US can refer people … but, only if the referral lives inside the US. It means that, eventually, Google will end up with what they wanted in the first place and, that still does not make sense to me.
As I said in the previous comment, I’d look out the link to Google’s update since this, which proved so unpopular. Here it is. They now say that:
This does not directly affect me either way, as I never made money from referrals, but anything that limits availability in or to anyone in any country is, IMHO, against the entire nature of the World Wide Web and, morally, no better than the Great Firewall of China.