Google Adsense Referrals to be retired

I got an email from Google Adsense this dawn:

Hello,

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals programme. We will be retiring the AdSense Referrals programme during the last week of August. After that time, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads.

The rest of the email gave instructions on how to remove Google Adsense Referrals from one’s website. Apparently, this new move is related to Google’s recent acquisition of the DoubleClick ad network. I got the following from Google Adsense help:

What happened to referrals?

During the last week of August, the AdSense referrals feature will be retired for both AdWords advertiser products and Google products. After careful consideration, we believe that we can best serve our advertisers and publishers through two alternative offerings, AdSense for content and DoubleClick Performics Affiliate.
[...]

How can I choose my own ads now that referrals are retired?

We understand the importance of being able to manually select the ads that appear on your site rather than having ads appear based on the Google ad auction. Though we’ll no longer offer referrals after August, you can still manually select the ads on your site using the Google Affiliate Network. Learn more about the Google Affiliate Network by visiting http://www.performics.com

I used Google Adsense Referrals on a website providing web-related services and carefully selected referral ads that were related to the web services, but which I did not offer directly. Though I earned from the Referral ads, I chose to remove them eventually since I was no longer satisfied with the ads competiting for attention from the website users.

Google Affiliate Network appears to be fully independent from Google Adsense. Publishers on either cannot login to the other unless they signed-up on both. There is much more scrutiny with entering the Affiliate Network.

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