Nothing is permanent in affiliate marketing. People seem to be lulled into a false sense of security that campaigns will continue to run, offers will continue to pay out, conversions will continue to happen, and so on. But you can’t count on anything. It’s like the standard disclaimer on every investment and stock, past performance is not indicative of future results. Yet, people always seem shocked when a hot offer suddenly stops, or a well running campaign is shut down. Count myself in that group. Even though you know it can happen, it’s always surprising when it happens to you. A few weeks ago, my top performing, longest running campaign on Google Adwords was effectively shut down. This campaign had been running nonstop for over a year, yet the algo change Google made totally killed it. I tried every trick I know to get it back up and running, but to no avail. It’s kind of sad that Google makes no effort to retain a “good customer”, but search relevance rules over customer loyalty it seems. At any rate, it just goes to prove my point that at any time affiliate income could all go away. So be prepared.

So Yahoo “officially” launched their Quality Based Pricing a few days ago.  According to Yahoo the key points to this system are:

• We’ll evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners’ sites.
• Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
• Discounts will automatically be applied to your account.

To me this is pretty much a non announcement. For one, it’s a totally black box system.  Advertisers have no insight to the conversion rates of the various sites and partners that are used to calculate the quality rating.  We are just supposed to wait and hope for discounts occasionally based on Yahoo’s calculations. We can’t make any changes to where our ads are displayed to react to quality issues.  This seems to be an effort by Yahoo to say “Hey, we care about quality, especially on our content network, so please use it”.