A Cautionary Tale

I promised I’d let you know why I was so steamed the other day so here goes:

The ads you see on my site are from affiliate companies. I sign up and agree to post their ads, they agree to pay me if you click on them and/or buy something from them. I am involved in several affiliate companies that supply these ads.

One of these companies, [redacted]. Well, let’s just say I don’t care for them. But that’s putting it mildly. They have a practice in which they only pay me if my commissions are greater than $50. That’s fine. What’s not fine is that as my account approached that number they found ways to take the money away from me. If my account goes for a few months without anyone buying anything they take $10 from my earned amount. So I went from $36 to $6 at which point they deactivated my account “due to dormancy” even though I was logging in at least 3 or 4 times a week to check my totals and to get new links to display for you.

You may be asking why I decided to stick with them and advertise with them. Good question. The answer is that one of their advertisers is eMusic, a company I really like and wanted to be able to link to them for artists that I cover. (this part will be addressed later)

Needless to say I’m livid. Firstly they “stole” $36 from me (for no good reason except that they can) and now I have to go through my entire website (over 5,000 reviews) and remove all the links that I have that go through this affiliate program. I ran a little test and it took me 20 minutes to do 5 of them. With over 5,000 posts to go through you can see how long this will take. It amounts to over 250 hours of time, which if I billed for it, would equal over $16,000.

This story does have a semi-happy ending. I contacted eMusic and expressed my um…distaste… with this advertiser. They told me they are involved with another affiliate program, to which I applied. I was accepted right away and within moments of my signing up I got a personal call from a rep there wanting to discuss how we can work together. I’ve been with them for one day and they’re already 100 times better than the evil advertiser.

If you’d like to read my open letter to the this fabulous advertiser click here.
If you want me to name names email me.

So feel free to click on the eMusic banners, they’ll report correctly. And really, eMusic is a great program so not only do I think you should get a trail because it will benefit Collected Sounds, but also you’ll be very happy with the selection of music to download and the customer service. Primo company!

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