The spirit of Affiliate programs and partnerships has been, as I recall, mostly an understanding of slow traffic hopefully building to a success of high traffic. I’ve participated in many affiliate programs and each company sponsoring an affiliate program is thankful for the links and traffic regardless of how slow it is. After all isn’t that how traffic is built? Such as a steady and gradual link building process that improves Google rankings and thus traffic?

The affiliate programs of today seem to be taking a different approach than the spirit of mutual link and traffic building. I evidence this by an email that I received from EBay, which makes me wonder if the spirit is gone. Below is what I received:

Dear Adam York,

After a review of our publisher accounts, we have found that the eBay Partner Network account registered under this e-mail address has been dormant for an extended period of time. As part of our efforts to dedicate as many resources as we can to active accounts, we plan to expire this inactive account on March 2, 2009.

Even though this account has been dormant, we ask that you remove any affiliate links that may be associated with it as you will not be paid for any activity after the account is expired. If your payment and tax information have been entered and your account has generated activity that results in more than five units of your payment currency prior to the account expiration, your pending earnings will be paid by the next payment cycle.

For reference, account expirations are covered in the ePN Network Agreement Section (L)(3)(a):

(3) Termination by ePN or an Advertiser

a. ePN may terminate this Agreement and your account, one of your websites, your use of a Promotional Method or your participation in a certain Program at any time for convenience in its sole discretion upon 3 days notice. An Advertiser may terminate your participation in its Program or your use of a Promotional Method at any time for convenience in its sole discretion upon 3 days notice.

We will not be reversing any dormant account expirations at this time, but we invite you to direct any questions to our Customer Service Team by visiting the following address:

https://publisher.ebaypartnernetwork.com/PublisherHelpPage

What does this mean? Well, a small, low traffic generator like myself apparently has no business promoting EBay on my Hubs. I understand that I agreed to the TOS, but come-on … has EBay become so large that they can afford to lose business in this economy. Both Google and Amazon don’t terminate low traffic affiliates so I am confused as to why EBay would.

I spent time and gave careful consideration to which products and links I would promote on my hubs. Therefore, EBay has the audacity to ask me to remove my links because they will not pay me? WTF!! I sign up to give EBay business and they don’t even want to send my payment if I find it burdensome to remove those links and replace the links with a competitor! Wow, I know I’m not a huge traffic generator but for God’s sakes man I’m already working for free when I write articles on Hub Pages.

This is the first time I’ve ever been thanked for making a (free) effort to drive traffic to an affiliate program by having my account canceled. Not only that, but now I have to do extra FREE work to remove those EBay links, that is; if I don’t want EBay to suck up any traffic I am generating.

When Google was verifying accounts at least they gave me more than three days. So, not only will I be killing my EBay affiliate program I will also be killing my EBay regular account and using a different online auction service to sell my wares.

Additionally, what I find interesting about the whole thing is that EBay never cancelled my regular user account even though I haven’t bought or sold anything in a long time.

So, to sum it up… where have the days gone where the spirit of mutual promotion was genuine regardless of the amount of activity gone? I don’t know but maybe the competitors will grab my business. Maybe I should have read the EBay TOC more carefully. Even if it is my fault, I still spent considerable time analyzing, evaluating and promoting products relevant to my Hubs without being paid for my efforts.

I didn’t join Hub Pages to get paid; but at minimum had hoped my efforts might drive a few American pennies my way for my free and under-trafficked efforts. Maybe when people stop writing for free or get board of reward-less self promotion things will change.

I won’t be giving EBay any more of my business and I hope all you Hubbers out there give some careful thought to posting EBay links in your hubs.

Hey, I’m writing for free and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me for a site like EBay to keep that 10 Kilobits of information about my account active, considering it costs nothing to store those 10Kb of Information.