Commission Junction flips half a BILLION sales — celebrates with a slap in the face

Congratulations to Commission Junction* for reaching a massive milestone in affiliate marketing. Somewhere between 3 and 5 AM PST on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006, Commission Junction logged it’s 500,000,000th transaction. Half a billion affiliate sales is quite an amazing task; if more than half were credited to the right affiliate, we’ll consider it a gift.

If you do some quick calculations on your own transaction IDs you can see that the volume they do is rather impressive. Over the average of the month (9 million in April), it appears to be about 200 transactions per minute. I’ve seen rates as high as 1000 transactions per minute on a Monday morning.
As if in a sort of masochistic celebration, on the same night they flip half a billion transactions, they also sent out a network-wide email to all affiliates with some very far reaching complications. According to the email (which I can’t quote due to Network Terms), all affiliates will be required to switch to javascript generated links for any merchant relationships formed after June 23rd. Read it again and let it sink in… the only option available to you will be pre-generated javascript-based links.

While this may open up additional options such as video ads, it is handcuffing the average affiliate by forcing them to display links in a way that may not be best suited for their sales or marketing techniques. Not to mention the extra page load time that will inevitably come if you have more than a dozen links on one page. To illustrate what a slow loading page with javascript links might look like, I’ve made the following example:

[ Click -- warning a 1 meg javascript file will load to illustrate a slow link ]

Now what these links might look like or what options you might have to create them is all speculation at this point. However it is obvious it will mean additional restrictions and re-tooling of many sites. While the email states legacy relationships will be able to keep using the old existing links, it does not say they will stay active indefinitely.

By employing javascript links you will be giving CJ the same sort of traffic and visitor information on your sites that you would get from a private Urchin or Analytics installation. We’ll be giving a network carte blanche to our site traffic patterns… for free.

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