Diversity Thread - Ebay Changes

[Ridge]

I know this is a general Poker affiliate forum, but many of us promote things other than gaming and ebay specifically. Here is an email I got today about changes to their program which could be really cool.

Today we're announcing Quality Click Pricing, a new payout structure designed to further reward the affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay and who send valued buyers to our sites.

What's Quality Click Pricing?

Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads. With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher's actions. The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive. Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day's traffic.

When will this change take place?

We plan to phase the introduction of Quality Click Pricing to ensure existing publishers have enough time to understand how this affects them.

* New publishers that join the eBay Partner Network as of September 1st will be paid out under the new system. This includes all publishers joining as they transition from TradeDoubler and affilinet.
* Publishers that joined eBay Partner Network prior to September 1st will remain on the current pricing system until October 1st, when they will begin to be paid under the new Quality Click Pricing payment structure. Before October 1st, and starting the last week in August, existing publishers will have access to a preview report to see how their new payouts compare with the existing payment structure for them.

How can I find out more about this change?

We know that you may have questions about Quality Click Pricing, so we have put together several resources to give you more information about it:

* Read more about this change and some of the reasons behind it on our blog, including a FAQs document.
* A new set of pages on the eBay Partner Network site that explain how Quality Click Pricing works in more detail will be available later today.
* Two new videos that explain the concept of Quality Click Pricing (one available today and a second that will explain new reports on September 1st).
* In addition, we will hold two live webinars to explain the change and give publishers the opportunity to ask questions. Find out more about the webinars.

We will also be on the boards more frequently over the next few days to answer publishers' questions.

We are very excited about the launch of Quality Click Pricing, as it will allow us to reward publishers who are driving high quality, engaged and incremental traffic to eBay. We are also committed to continuing to invest in helping our publishers succeed with eBay Partner Network, and to ensuring that everyone is rewarded fairly for the value they generate for eBay.

We look forward to working with you on this new endeavor. Thanks for your continued support!

Sincerely,

Steve Hartman,

The eBay Partner Network

[MJ]

First look has me sketched out, those who used to promote Ebay early on will probably remember how they've squeezed down the affiliate program repeatedly......this looks like there is no transparency at all!

Will be interesting as hell to see how they "value" traffic, it could be great or not.

[Randy Ray]

I'd be surprised if most people's earnings went UP because of this change, but who knows?

[NickM]

You WOULD be surprised they went up or you WOULDN'T be surprised they went up?

[nirva]

I think he did in fact mean would be surprised as would I be. Ebay has never made a change that increased affiliate earnings in my experience, why would they?

As MJ said there's no transparency, it sounds like it'll be on a par with the Adwords QS/CPC. There are far better niches/programs to move diversify into these days.

[Randy Ray]

I meant exactly what I wrote. I'd be VERY surprised if people's earnings go up as a result of this change.

[PTC]

I'd be VERY surprised if people's earnings go up as a result of this change.

For a few people earnings will go up, as a whole the affiliate community will be paid less Im sure. I dont believe they would do this if this was not the case. They have likely already run the last 5 years of affiliate data through the new breakdown to see what the net change would have been.

[Ridge]

Well the first few months we will all get a side by side look at the comparison for each. Lots of things will need to be tweaked to get max value out of this, since your CPC is calculated depending on the quality of traffic you send Per Click, which means in theory "buy it now" people could be more valuable than auction people. also depends a lot more on your niche.

I am still an ebay noob, but reading the phpbay forums and the ebay forums is interesting. I see good and bad things out of this. Overall I agree this is not good, but manageable for us.

[Spry]

hopefully if you have a good quality score right now you should get the higher earnings per click. It adjusts every day though so it will be interesting to compare. I also agree that as a group overall affiliate earnings will go down. theres more fish in the sea than ebay if it begins to suck badly.

[imteaz]

it would be interesting to see how much actually we earn from click.
one of my site get 6k to 7k click per month. but traffic are mixed with US, Canada and Asia.
So lets see...