Myself I think this is a good change, this makes it so that you have to have your own site promoting amazon products if you plan to use PPC methods, rather then making several astores and pumping paid traffic through it. I think it's just a way for Amazon to weed out the grey hat marketers
Got reply from Amazon, so it is for sure that PPC > AOM > Amazon is OK. Plus Amazon is changing their FAQ regarding Datafeed notify see below...This looks like we have no need to notify Amazon now.
If you read the 2nd post on this page at their forums http://forums.prosperotechnologies.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=am-associhelp&msg=26747.18&ctx=0 you will see that they are saying you can NOT do PPC to a page that contains an Astore.
I can't see any reason why amazon would do this, they are only going to lose profits. They must make alot of money from their afiliates. There are alot of people who rely on ppc as a traffic method.
I think the change Amazon made is going to clear out some ppc arbitrage, and make search engine results alot cleaner at the same time. The affiliates doing ppc can always use an Amazon Associate website to drive traffic, as well as natural seo. The affiliates still standing will start getting better placements once the change is in effect. Good luck to everyone affected by the new rules, especially Amazon Hunter. thanks, PuReWebDev
This is bad for people who just started , with no web traffic and need PPC to get some. You need to work harder.
It's not really a huge change, direkt linking is prohibited by most affiliate programs, own landingpages work MUCH better anyway.
I wonder how much this change will end up hurting their business. I know Amazon was using a 3rd party to manage their paid search so it actually might save them money since they don't need to compete as much.
It will actually help their business, since they won't have to compete with their own affiliates on their own website and with all the direct linking over the last years I'm pretty sure they have a decent keyword database. That's the big disadvantage with direct linking, you hand out your keywords to the program owner on a silver tablet (if your tracking script doesn't kill the referrers or if you don't use any own tracking at all)...so you shouldn't be surprised if you get told that your services aren't needed any more.