amazon.com: terminating "paid search traffic"

Pulling the plug on May 1st

[swa66]

Amazon is stopping payout to affiliates that send them paid search traffic [affiliate-program.amazon.com]:

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. As of May 1, 2009, these paid search Associates will not be paid referral fees.

[swa66]

Ok, I've never sold a single PC over at any of the amazons (well the US one is the only one that actually sells stuff for me anyway).

There used to be a 10$ cap on everything in a long forgotten past somthing mostly those pushing electronics whined about. Just as 15% payout was possible from the very first sale you made, all gone now.

I mostly sell books, cheap ones too, but I sell a few of them.

A thousand books in a month at $1 commission a piece: you'd need to sell more than 8 $3000 TVs in the same time frame to match that. Not something my sites would do, the books go out on auto-pilot the TVs would never do that.

[skibum]

I think this is related to the same issue that Google wanted to address last month. The affiliate traffic is good for amazon but there is no real value that the affiliate is adding to earn their commission.

:) I've seen a number of merchants who think that too. They'll come out with a new policy that says no PPC bidding direct to the merchant and then a few months later when the affiliate program tanks and their in-house teams or agencies can't hack it they come back looking for affiliates to fill in the gap. It's surprising what someone doing PPC in their underwear who has to take PPC costs out of an affiliate payout can do compared to an agency getting paid by the hour or on a percentage of media spend.

[BriGuy20]

Quoth Purplecape:

I question the assumption that Amazon was actually getting significant traffic/sales from direct-to-Amazon PPC advertising by Associates.
On the Amazon Associate discussion boards, the regulars are all people with web sites. If that's a representative sample, then those using PPC are a distinct minority.

Anyone got any real numbers on this?

(Disclosure of my bias--I am an Amazon Associate with a website, and have never used PPC advertising, whether to my site or Amazon's)

I've sold over $1 million worth of amazon stuff mainly via PPC, so I helped a bit. :)

[edited by: BriGuy20 at 6:51 am (utc) on April 18, 2009]

[purplecape]

A data point! Thanks, BriGuy20. Now we just need the other 900,000 Associates to post their earnings and how they made them. I'll start. I've sold over $200,000 worth of Amazon stuff, without using PPC....

[wrgvt]

I've generated income of $30,000-$40,000 a year from amazon by using PPC directly to the amazon site. That's profit, not revenue. I've been doing it for years and am sorry to see it end at the beginning of next month.

I'm curious how well amazon will do with their own PPC ads, but I'm also sure they won't share that information with anyone else.