Adsense for Idiots: Adsense Referrals Ending through Adsense

This week most Adsense and Adwords users received an email indicating that Google would no longer run product referrals through their own systems.

The question now becomes one of 'Will Google start a new product referral program through their newly acquired DoubleClick advertising company or will they just give up on referring people into their own advertising platform?'

I've got a feeling that this may be the temporary end of this program for Google, but it might be something that pops back up with their competition from Microsoft. In the meantime, I suspect there are going to be a lot of people trashing their pages and sites dedicated to educating new users to Adsense and Adwords like cheesy company logo shirts getting tossed out after you leave a company for a better job.

Hello,
Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:
    * Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
    * AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.
If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:
    * Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
    * Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information
Why is this happening?
We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882
Sincerely.
The Google AdSense Team