eBay is Leaving Commission Junction - Poor Mans BANS Updates Required

Alright, so I’m a little late writing about this, but since releasing the poor mans bans (a free BANS alternative), I felt compelled to tell my readers. Yesterday morning I logged in to check my email. Once of the unread messages had the subject: eBay Advances Affiliate Offering with eBay Partner Network. In short, eBay is leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate matters into their own hands. Starting April 1st, 2008, eBay’s affiliate platform will go live, and all CJ pids will become invalid. Here’s and excerpt from the email,

“We are excited to announce eBay’s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network. The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform. While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.”

New eBay Affiliate Benefits

To read the official eBay press release, go here. Well, this upset me to no end. All my Poor Mans BANS will go defunct on April 1st. Is this some kind of pre-April fools joke? Unfortunately, this looks like the real deal. However, there are some positive perks coming with the new eBay affiliate network. Once the network goes live, eBay affiliates will be able to receive credit for global registrations from multiple countries. You get some kid in Trinidad to sign up, $25 for you. Ok, well, maybe I’m dreaming here, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Get Started Now

So for all your Poor Mans BANS users out there, goto eBay’s affiliate site, sign-up, and start rebuilding your RSS feeds. Hopefully I’ll be able to release an automated way of carrying out the transition (I’d have to update over 300 feeds by hand if not), but since my day job is forcing me to go play in the woods for a week, that may not happen in time. I’ll pay one of your crafty php developers out there to come up with something (Patrick? Congrats on the promosh by the way).

Eggs In One Basket…

I’ve always known having more than one stream of revenue is beneficial to any on-line marketer’s success. Vic from Blogger Unleashed would agree; perhaps he isn’t so crazy after all. Vic recently published a Vlog about why diversified income is so important, and although he speaks like he’s your father doped up on pain and anti-psychotic meds, he does have a method to his madness. If the Poor Mans BANS is all you’re investing time in, take additional steps to create Adsense sites, lead generation sites, product review sites, etc, etc. Diversify your income - bottom line.

Poor Mans BANS Goes BIG

Sam submitted a comment yesterday telling me his Drupal version of a Poor Mans BANS was in the USA Today. Sam mentioned the article only brought 30 visits, but I’m sure that link looks damn good to Google. Here’s the USA Today article, and here’s Sam’s Poor Mans BANS. Oh, and by the way, Sam. Thanks for mentioning Nullamatix in all your fame and glory Just Teasing! Congrats dood, that’s awesome! I wish you more success in the future.