Amazon to stop paying for referrers that come directly from PPC After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs. As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. http://affiliate-blog.amazon.com/2009/04/change-to-amazon-associates-program.html
Given Google and others are have the one url display only rule - it probably won't matter much as many if not most have already created landing pages/sites for PPC purposes. Ofcourse they are getting slapped left and right but quality sites are safe.
i got the email this morning too. This is a real shame, and a ridiculously bad move on amazon's part. Well, all internet companies can't be as smart google i guess.....
I believe that when EBay banned digital downloads from auction products everybody believed that they would pay a massive price but the truth is sales stayed high and people waited for the product to arrive on a CD Rom. I think this surprised EBay so much that they decided then to set a shipping cost limit to stop people from making profit by shipping and handling cost. Now we have Amazon flexing their muscles against PPC. Just a thought but is the WWW passing the wild west stage and starting to lay down some firm ground rules? Davmac
This is pretty weird. I bet they get enough referral traffic and search engine traffic but I still can't figure out why they're doing this. I haven't ever promoted amazon through PPC myself.
I believe it's something to do with tax laws and Amazon positioning themselves to not have a "presence" in various states where the affiliate resides. This is a huge issue, and we are only seeing the beginning of it.