Did You Get Fired from eBay?
You’ve probably heard the rumblings lately about eBay letting some of its publishers go from their affiliate network. Actually, a couple thousand got the boot. Fortunately, I’m still in the program… *keeps fingers crossed*. The initial response from eBay was that they’ve parted ways with the affiliates who aren’t delivering them quality traffic. I guess this is fair, but when have you heard of an affiliate network just dropping its publishers like flies because they can’t deliver quality traffic? I mean, there’s some networks I belong to that I don’t even promote, but they still keep me on board.
One of my colleagues over at the Digital Point forums has been an eBay affiliate since day 1 and brought in thousands of daily hits to one of his BANS sites. The income stream for this particular affiliate was about $500 a month, but surprisingly he still got the boot last week. His personal eBay rep cited the previous response of “non-quality traffic” as the reason, but remained optimistic that they could continue their business relationship in the future at some point. Big deal.
The point is, a lot of publishers are pissed off at eBay — and for good reason. Many have put their sweat and tears in to developing BANS sites and consider this a major slap in the face.
As with anything Internet Marketing related, you can’t just focus on one project or one income stream. As you can see, things can happen so quickly that are way out of your control and you just need to roll with the punches. They say only the strong survive, but in the word of online marketing, it’s only the smart ones who stay afloat.

August 25th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I wonder what made them take this decision…you never know when an affilaite starts to market your product….its like having a big email list and you start cleaning up people who have not bought your products…you never now when some one will start to market it and become your biggest affilaite…
August 26th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I totally agree that one needs to have a diversified income stream. My largest online stream is adsense. If I didn’t have it I might probably stop blogging altogether 🙁