Commission Junction’s Link Management Initiative (LMI)

RWilson on June 19th, 2006 8:26 am

Feels like CJ needs an attitude shift. As someone who likes to know my numbers, changing to javascript links will break my tracking, remove the ability to email affiliate links and generally be a pain. CJ needs to remember we have a choice…

We definitely should have a choice in this matter!

Ros

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Susan Arts on June 20th, 2006 8:30 am

We’ve also been keeping a close eye on this issue as well Ros! We’ve communicated our network stand in a blog post on Share Results (feel free to check it out here - http://blog.shareresults.com/index.php?p=171).

In our opinion, we’d offer it (JS links) as part of our larger affiliate and merchant toolsets… which will still include HTML links. When a new feature is truly useful, we’ve never had to require our affiliates and merchants to use them - our partners take advantage of it themselves.

Thanks for letting me contribute

Susan

Cheers,
Rosalind

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jollyjuliecricket2 on June 22nd, 2006 8:10 am

CJ’s moves are extremely frustrating, however, there must be SOME intelligent reason for this change. CJ’s management class could arguably be deemed to be “out of touch” with reality, but one would assume and believe mid-level management as well as their technical engineering staff would be aware of the problems these changes with cause for affiliates. Affiliates have always occupied a precarious, almost disposable position within the online business food chain. The changes being made by CJ will likely further that assumption.

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fsboservice.net on June 26th, 2006 16:12 pm

One of the key issues is: what exactly is their rationale? I haven’t seen an explanation of it — technical, system-based, economic, business or otherwise — simply an imposition of ‘we’ve decided’ and ‘this is how it will be’ ‘to hell with affiliates’ — which is certainly not good business practice (and I have no idea about best practices for web sites, coding, etc, but I do know that javascript is problematic).

And it once more leaves affiliates in the vulnerable position as well as places the burden of such changes on affiliates without (to my knowledge) any rational explanation, any invitation to comment, anything remotely resembling respect for affiliates.

Them’s my 2 centavos FWIW.

AND If anyone knows of the location explicating the ‘technical rationale’ for all this or instances of how CJ involved the affiliate community in creating a buy-in (ever heard of ‘incentives’ for change anyone in CJ and other big-affiliate systems-land?) … I’d be thrilled to analyze it and make my own decision for myself in determining whether I’ll continue with CJ if this is how they treat their affiliates.

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David Thomas on June 26th, 2006 16:40 pm

The old links still work (they are now called ‘legacy links’), and it’s interesting to note that the Javascript code in the links only seems to consist of several document.write statements that just copy what is between the quotes into the page. It’s conceivable that you could take what’s inside the quotes in those statements, and add that code directly into your web page. I agree that it will make for slower loading of pages if you don’t either do this, or use legacy links.

An alternative is to use email links or keyword links in your web page, where available. These should still work fine.

I imagine that affiliate pressure will keep legacy links working indefinitely; CJ have promised to notify us six months in advance of any changes to this. I would imagine that some merchants will also pressure CJ into keeping legacy links open, because they stand to lose out from affiliates not updating links and/or dropping programmes.

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