Quality Click Pricing from eBay

eBay announced its Quality Click Pricing for it's affiliates today.  This comes as a major change in the way eBay affiliates will make money.  For years now, eBay affiliates have relied on posting auctions to their site and would be rewarded when a user wins a bid that they were linked to from their site.  This was able to occur because a cookie would be placed on the viewer's computer and if the viewer purchased anything within 7 days, or if they signed up to eBay within 30 days, the owner of the affiliate site would get a commission.  This new program is getting mixed reviews all over the forums however.

The new eBay policies

According to eBay, the new policy will be a pay per click policy and seems to be venturing away from the old method of sales commissions.  That basically means that every time someone clicks on an auction link on your site you'll be paid.  To those who have a very low turn over rate, meaning those who have a lot of clicks with very few sales will make a lot of money right?  Maybe, maybe not.

According to eBay, they are going to assess the "traffic quality" and judging by that, they will tell you how much you'll make per click.  Unfortunately, and a strong disagreement lies within this, is that they haven't and its unsure if they will, release their formula for their algorithms.  Without releasing their algorithms, we as site owners have no idea how to improve on our stats which could also help improve eBay's net profits as well.  

On the other hand, I understand why they don't release their formula as if they release their formula, it can be exposed in negative ways.  Website owners may optimize their site only to satisfy the formula while not providing any kind of engaging experience for the visitors.  Something that could only hurt the more ethical website owners.  However, this is a problem for the thousands of people who make a lot based on their ACRU's for the month.  They may be hurt deeply by the fact that they will no longer get commissions and instead get possibly pennies on the click.  So if their main cash crop site sells $40,000 cars that they usually got $300 per sale from, they would now only be getting anywhere from $.06 to $.26 or more per click. 

I feel as if this may be helpful as I have a lot of eBay affiliate pages that I get a lot of clicks and a lot of bids, but don't get many winning bids.  However, since I don't know, and can't tell if they are classified as "quality" clicks, I won't know how much money I will ever make.  Only time will tell.

This program, which is set to be implemented for new users September 1st, 2009 and October 1st for existing publishers is obviously in favor of eBay.  In these tough economic times, eBay needs to find ways to cut costs and although they say this will be a help, it might just as well be a crutch to help us make money.