If done right, you can earn a lot from referrals. For my site, FF referrals worked best, but it really depends on your niche. If your site caters to webmasters that want to start earning money, then you should be able to do very well with Adsense referrals. If your site is about fishtanks, then you will have a hard time converting any referrals. By integrating your referrals into your content, and promoting/endorsing the product (yes, this is allowed) you can do even better. endorsing my referrals this way is what helped make me the "FF Referral King". I came up with a simple method of creating a FF "ad" and integrating it into my pages that works so well Google now recommends this method in their help & support pages. See this link on the Adsense Support pages for an example: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43870&topic=8972 Just putting a referral button or link on your page with no endorsement will not get you very good results. PS - a month or so ago Google changed the way the Adsense referrals pay-out, making it much more likely that you will get a conversion/payout, and the full payout is now much higher.. But IMHO, it's still a lot more difficult than FF or GooglePack..
I'm still trying work on Adsense and Adwords referral. I'm doing quite fine with FF and Google Pack. I totally agree with you. It depends on the website niche.
This site has created a very cool wordpress plugin that detects the browser of visitors and displays a special message advising the visitor to get firefox/google pack if they are an IE user: whatjapanthinks.com/recommend-google-pack-wordpress-plugin/
What do you think about the Google Checkout Referral? http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/03/referrals-now-with-google-checkout.html
I've just put the FF and GooglePack referrals up on my sites. It seems like the AdSense/Adwords would be difficult to convert. For AdSense, you'd basically be looking for someone who was interested in monetizing their site but needed you to tell them about AdSense. Not likely to happen, plus you're still depending on them to bring in revenue for you to get the credit. About half of my visitors are using a browser other than FireFox, and I think it's safe to assume that these users are less likely to have any parts of GooglePack installed either. All I need for them to convert is to click the link and click "download". We'll see how it goes. Seems like it would be tough to convert a Checkout referral, but I could be wrong.
Google Pack and FF is quite easy but when it come to adsense and adword it quite difficult. I agree with you.
Anyone make good money with the new Google Adsense Referrals? Right now I only promote Google product. Never tried the other yet.