Well there goes 6 years of work.. If you look at eBay’s stock you can see that they are desperate for something to increase revenue, but they have truly failed miserably with the god awful ebay partner network.

This will go down as one of the biggest disasters in internet history.

Yes, most of mine are pretty targeted, which is why it was such a pain for me to change the links (I think I still have old links up from the last time they changed them in CJ!). Basically tailored to my site, searches for specific movie stars by name and specific magazine titles.

I don’t get a lot of new users coming through, I mean who the hell isn’t at least registered with eBay at this point(!), but a few per year (I guess them!), so I will be curious to see what I get for them.

Cliff

I do not believe for a minute this was done for any other reason than to save eBay cash outflow. It is the classic ‘trust me’ skimming the edge of bait and switch eBay play.

eBay will access its proven quality crystal ball, “the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers a publisher sends, the higher the tier the publisher will receive.” which will run on proprietary secret algorithms based on the old 10 for me and one for you ’sharing’ plan.

In the short term they will cut out the CJ layer and given the time of year it may produce substantial savings through the season with benefits 3Q & 4Q to the Marketplace divisions.

Sellers will pay for it throughout, as they pay for everything now. Food for thought – less sellers to share the bill, higher payments.

Not a fan of the ACRU change, as it seems unnecessarily cloudy and confusing, but overall I’m generally happy with the switch to EPN so far (at least after I changed over most of my links…that was a lot of work! Still updating some custom links).

I’ve topped what I was averaging from CJ every month so far, the payments actually reach my bank account a couple of days earlier each month (so I can now somewhat count on my EPN money as part of the kitty towards my monthly eBay bill again), and I find my way around their reports easier than I did with CJ which always confused me.

It’s still my top earner outperforming AdSense and absolutely blowing Amazon out of the water (which I still can’t understand! Amazon products are extremely relevant to my site, and they should do just as well, but it’s never been close).

Yes, I must admit I trusted the program more at CJ and was devastated at the amount of work put on my plate when the switch was announced, but so far the bottom line is even a little better so I won’t complain.

This quick change in policy (ACRU) is unsettling however. It definitely shows that the move in-house had more of a reason behind it than simply getting the program in-house. Hopefully this isn’t the first shot in a series of changes and that they can leave well enough alone for awhile now. After all, eBay seems to be focused on making buyers happy right now, hopefully they still put a premium on acquiring them.