eBay Ditched CJ and ValueClick
I received the announcement today that eBay will promote their affiliate program independently. This will start on April 1st and run with CJ for another month. With a company as big as eBay, I often wondered why they used a 3rd party platform in the first place. I played around with their developer's kit and this announcement will make their promotion more robust through new banners and API's.
All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same – access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. In addition, the eBay partner network will provide several new features:
- Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
- New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
- New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
- More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs
Will CJ and other networks be relevant a few years down the road? Maybe for smaller players but what's preventing them from going direct to the publishers?
Comments
You're absolutely correct. It's interesting that they even chose to use a 3rd party when it came to their affiliate program. We suppose this is a good move for Ebay as they can definitely pull their own weight in that arena...but definitely not a good thing for ValueClick and CJ. They will always exist but definitely for the smaller companies.
"Maybe for smaller players but what's preventing them from going direct to the publishers?"
Well, for starters, we hate dealing with a lot of little guys with their own affiliate programs. It's really labor intensive to start up, they often have buggy affilate software, and you end up making nothing most of the time.
Secondly, ValueClick and CJ are the enforcers for payment, prompt payment. If a publisher doesn't get paid, the affiliate is put on ice until it's ironed out.
Maybe eBay used the partnership to learn the affiliate ropes.
I really appreciate CJ as they are their advertisers offer good deals and CJ has an excellent interface.
I'm not discounting the role of CJ and other networks. In fact, they took the plunge to make affiliate marketing easier and more accessible. The point here is that it's difficult to be reliant on a larger player. They could easily flip the switch that will cause a huge hit on earnings. CJ and Lending Tree discontinued our affiliate links without warning us. In that case, they were the larger player.
Also, with the networks, you don't really know what the actuall "cut" is.
The web is evolving and so are businesses if they want to remain relevant.
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