Affiliates Up in Arms About MAJOR Link Changes at CJ
Affiliates are really upset about big changes that were just announced by Commission Junction. The announcement involves a series of major changes to CJ’s link tracking methods which are supposed to help with the ad blocking problem, among other things. However, affiliates feel the switch to Javacript links will cause a huge amount of extra work, reduce SEO effectiveness, interfere with marketing flexibility and increase page load times - along with questioning some of CJ’s motives for this new change.
In case you haven’t heard the news yet today or you got the CJ email but are having a hard time deciphering what it means (as usual) I can help boil it down for you. Err… actually I’m not going to do any commentary because I’m just taking in all in myself and trying to weigh the implications for both affiliates and merchants. So I’ll just point you to some in-depth info from a couple guys that are WAY smarter than me and let them boil it down for you. 1st lets hear from Alex Firmani a strong CJ affiliate, then on to some of the pros at Revenews.
Commission Junction flips half a BILLION sales — celebrates with a slap in the face
“As if in a sort of masochistic celebration, on the same night they flip half a billion transactions, they also sent out a network-wide email to all affiliates with some very far reaching complications. According to the email… all affiliates will be required to switch to javascript generated links for any merchant relationships formed after June 23rd. Read it again and let it sink in… the only option available to you will be pre-generated javascript-based links.”
Jeremy Palmer a CJ Performer boils it down over at ReveNews.
Commission Junction Announces New Affiliate Links “The Bottom Line: The new JavaScript linking format will give CJ more flexibility and control over their links and creative. The new links will also give CJ Google-AdSense-like insight into their publishers, which will help eliminate rogue affiliates from their network.”
Scott Jangro at Revenews gives us his take on the changes and I have to agree that I think part of CJ’s motivation for all the changes deals with what Scott mentions below.
What’s Behind CJ’s Link Management Initiative? “Polution: Let’s face it. The Internet has become overrun by sites mass-produced to make money. Affiliate marketing has played no small part in this. JavaScript links, at least currently, are un-spidered by search engines, and this may be a move by Commission Junction to clean up the streets of trash with a big green “CJ” on it. The more affiliate marketers piss off the search engines, the larger the bulls-eye becomes on CJ’s backside. JavaScript links may, at the very least, slow and even reverse the proliferation of affiliate links, masquerading as content, filling up the search engines and forcing them to clean it up. My gut feeling is that this is the big one. Self-preservation is a strong motivator.”
In order to understand the full ramifications of these changes you need to read the concerns affiliates have raised in a VERY HOT 5 page thread that has built up just since last night at the forum thats linked to in the Revenews blogs above. Some merchants and AMs have even started threads over there about the need for everyone to switch networks and not use CJ any more.
Jim Kukral had to turn comments off over at Revenews due to a rash of unrelenting blog spam, so feel free to comment here or in the CJ thread I just started in the 5 Star Forum.
#1 Jane wrote on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006:
The thing that bothers me most about this whole CJ links thing is their claim that only 1% of web users using CJ links have JavaScript turned off, and of those apparently only some small fraction actually makes a purchase.
That figure of 1% is absolutely wrong - it is, in fact 10% - and when the links do change, then visitors will end up with numerous blank spaces on our sites where the JavaScript links should be, but are obviously not, because JS will be turned off!
Where does this figure of 10% come from? From none other than the well respected W3C site: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Where does CJ’s 1% come from? They’re most likely citing the percentage of browsers which use their links which are not capable of supporting JS - which is a whole lot different to the number of browsers with JS turned off.
Without doubt earnings will go down. This is just a bad thing all around, and their claim that JS links are the way that the modern web is going is complete garbage. I would imagine, and hope, that we’ll see a large-scale exit of merchants from CJ to affiliate programs which practise much better business sense.
#2 CJ Comments on the Big Link Change Debacle - New UPDATE - Cash in on Google Adsense wrote on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006:
[…] LINDA BUQUET: CJ’s new Link Management Initiative has caused more speculation, conspiracy theories and noise than our industry has seen for a quite some time. (See previous article for overview: Affiliates Up in Arms About MAJOR Link Changes at CJ. Ever since Todd Crawford, the “Voice of CJ” left the company, affiliates and even some merchants that live in the forums, have felt like they have been left in the cold when important issues come up. […]