Affiliate Rant!

Persistence pays.

In case you hadn’t noticed, eBay is rife with copyright infringement. If you’re interested in monitoring eBay for your wares, have a look at SearchDigger. The key for free information providers is to restrict resale of their information. That won’t stop everyone, but it does give you legal recourse when approaching eBay and the legal authorities. The unfortunate fact is that most content authors never discover their stolen content and when they do they rarely do more than request that eBay remove the offending listing. A few well publicized lawsuits would probably do much to stem the tide of this growing problem.

Beginning July 1, 2006 eBay will raise affiliate commissions on the low end.  I can’t tell if the move is revenue neutral - only eBay knows, but what is apparent is that they are very interesting in driving interest in their affiliate program with people new to the program.  New affiliates driving $100 - $999.99 in fee revenue winning bids can earn 50% of the fees.  This is up from 40% prior to the new rate schedule becoming effective.

So, I browsed over to sirius.com to have at look at the current radio options and I see this:

and I click it and then I see this…

“Always open, eh?” False advertising?

It’s easy enough to browse over to eBay and buy something, but how about getting a good deal? Not so easy…

From the Did You Know Department:

I have been monitoring quite a few auctions lately and I have determined that new eBay auction listings seem to appear in the XML web service approximately 4 hours and 10 minutes after being listed by an eBay user.  Strange…

I have thrown together several tactics to blunt the effectiveness of eBay bid snipers.  You can learn more here:

eBay Bid Sniping