For the third time in four years CJ has disabled my account. This gets old, expecially when I put up page links then find out later that CJ no longer has my account active. Receive no email notification or reason when they do this. I always find out after the fact when I try to log in to check stats at cj.com. Have only gotten 1 check ever from cj.com, but have gotten lots from other affiliates. Have a focused travel site with a PR5 and have been online for over 10 years. Have found it MUCH more productive to deal directly with advertisers whenever possible than go through a middleman like cj.com, which I view as shady at best.
I assume that you do not promote cj programs very much then? If so, they see you as inactive. Their policy is to disable accounts that haven't had any sales in a certain period of time (IIRC it is onmly 1 months or something short anyway). On the other hand if you are promoting CJ programs and your results are so bad, why stay with them?
If you haven't made a sale in 6 months on a site that you seem to claim to be such a popular, focused, and established site, then why are you upset at their deactivation? You're not making money off of it, and if you're convinced that you really CAN make money, just go ahead and open a new account. What are you so bitter about, besides the lack of email notification (which I'm skeptical about), if you weren't making any money to begin with? I've had site that have been terminated from advertising programs where I was getting $1500-3000/mo checks due to "publisher network consolidation" (a.k.a. inability to fill the current CPM inventory) - Now that's something to complain about.
By the way, I don't endorse CJ's decision to disable publishers whose accounts haven't made sales, but I also don't see why people get so worked up over it, either.
The middleman you are saying are actually called as "Third Trusted Party". The reason I and many other publishers doing affiliate marketing through CJ or other networks is "Trust". There are many advertisers running their own affiliate program other than the CJ affliate program but i prefer to deal them through CJ because Cj is more trusted to me than the indvidual advertiser. Also if you have an issue with advertiser than who will you complain if you are not doing it through CJ. Also indvidual advertiser programs put many kind of restrictions like having minimum of $$$ amount before releasing the money to you or holding your money for certain time of period etc.... But you can always go to do work directly with advertiser if you have good relationship with them in past. Regards, Adnan Azam
Did you read the CJ TOS re inactive accounts? If your account has been disabled 3 times in 4 years, you can't have been trying too hard - or maybe you're just a slow learner I've signed up for lots of affiliate programs - and never ended up using half of them. If I tried to log into them now I wouldn't be at all suprised if my account was deleted (not just suspended).
I got my account disabled with them too, and their only answer is to open a new account, but you can't do it with the same email address. How come their system can't handle it? Ridiculous!
I have much more success with dealing directly with affiliates. More personal and they pay me as I earn commissions, not after a min. amount of say $100. I simply don't trust CJ.
I do that with some too, but at some point it start to be so time consuming dealing with each affiliate separately, just going from site to site to site, to check stats is time consuming. If you deal only with very few it's easy to keep track.
Hello: At last we now know we're not alone. We have just had the same experience with Commission Junction deactivating our account, without any e-mail notice or explanation. We have posted an inquiry in this forum to find out if anyone might know what is wrong with them. It doesn't seem right that we have to spend thousands of dollars promoting affiliate programs that we signed up through them. Then without any reason or explanation, they de-activate the account. And when you phone them, they give you a run around and tell you to phone another company who is the real owner of CJ. And when you phone that company, nobody answers the phone. Is this s scam? Are they enegaged in fraud? Is the deactivation of the member's account a ploy that enables them to steal our affiliate commissions? We want to hear from any forum members who have had the same experience so we may consider filing a complaint with FTC and a class action lawsuit.
I think most people know that your account gets deactivated when you don't generate any sales for a long period of time (I think it is 6 months), in which case you don't have any affiliate commissions for them to steal. I'm not a big earner with CJ but I do generate some sales each month. They seem pretty reasonable to me. You are all wet with this complaint idea.
If you've spend thousands of dollar promoting affiliate programs, but haven't generated any sales in 6 months (the reason why CJ deactivates most accounts), then you're doing something terribly wrong.