Joel's Mundane Life

Bet this one's pissing a few people off this morning - just got an email from Amazon regarding their affiliate scheme:

After careful review of our Associates programme, we have made the decision that as of February 1, 2010, we will no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.co.uk, http://astore.amazon.co.uk or www.javari.co.uk through keyword bidding or other paid search on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other search engine, or their extended search networks. In connection with this change, as of February 1, 2010, we will no longer provide Associates who engage in such paid search activities with access to our Product Advertising API or datafeeds.

Or to put it in laymans' terms, those Google adwords which direct you to Amazon aren't usually paid for by Amazon, it's someone doing a man-in-the-middle type thing. One can only really presume that it was causing untold levels of fraudulent activity if they're going to stop paying out on it.

More obviously as I read it ('extended search networks') this is probably going to slap cybersquatters (sorry, 'domainers') from putting links to Amazon on unused domains. I could be wrong on that though.