Affiliate Rant!

You know what I mean - you join a list or buy a product from some fine person. The list is useful or the product gets the job done and you are on your merry way until … the emails start flooding in. The guy must have the new products feed from ClickBank uploading directly into his email program! It seems like every new offer up on ClickBank has found its way into your mailbox. No, I am not interested in turning $10 into $10,000 in only one year using a new and novell HYIP. The flood of emails are unceasing. Really! I don’t need 150 prebuilt Adsense sites I can throw up instantly and make BIG MONEY along with 1,000 other people using the same content. It just doesn’t end and that’s a damn shame.

I have written an article that provides some strategies for avoiding Adsense blindness on websites. The article can be found here: Adsense Blindness - How To Beat It!
Here’s a brief excerpt:

Sneaky and stealthy, the Google we all love. It seems Google has determined that their financial exposure was to great under the old terms of the Adsense Affiliate Program so they changed the terms but failed to let anyone know. Under the old terms there was no time limit on the amount of time a new publisher could take to reach $100 in earnings. Once a referred publisher reached $100, the referring affiliate collected his $100 referral commission. The new terms impose a 90 day time limit for the referred publisher to reach the $100 goal.

Urchin, a pretty darn nice web analytics program owned by Google, is now free. The free offer only applies to the on-demand version of Urchin. Impressive offer.

I just received a note from Dan Burkhart, Director of the eBay Affiliate Program. In it he writes that eBay has determined three specific instances when affiliate commissions are not being credited under the new commission structure:

You read it right. eBay has announced that effective today it has eliminated all fees within the Developer Program for all users of the new Unified Schema. They have also eliminated all certification fees! Note that free calls do not apply to users of the older schema.