Amazon will stop paying its associates who send traffic to their product pages through search campaigns. This will start effectively 1st May 2009 and currently applies only to Amazon US and Amazon Canada. You can read more about it here.
Amazon hasn’t been very kind with its cookie duration of 24 hours, but at least there were affiliates (or associates as Amazon calls them) who were still pulling in nice amount of money using paid search and direct linking together, especially during the holidays and festive seasons.
More indication that direct linking will be dead in the future? I believe so. If you’ve been direct linking without having your own authority sites or landing pages, it will just be a matter of time before big merchants like Amazon bans direct linking. Now Amazon has got this started, I wonder which merchant will be the next to follow.
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This is too sad, my earning for a few last month were dropping from $100 to 0 until this month. All I can do just stick to Adsense as my main sources..
David says
Agreed, but it’s also good that affiliates now know that they shouldn’t just take the fast and easy way out of earning through ppc direct linking. Building a site to get paid by Amazon takes quite a lot of work as well since most people just don’t click and buy on-the-spot, and amazon’s 24 hour affiliate cookie duration doesn’t help either.