Yes, just been reading the email myself and couldn't help wondering if my experience of driving revenue traffic to eBay will now mirror my experience of ACRUs by becoming worth increasingly less.

I know we are supposed to "adapt to survive" and all that good stuff but can't we at least catch some oxygen, coffee and peace for five minutes before having to rethink everything yet again?

There comes a point where the unknown nature of future rewards will simply deter me making any further effort.

If that is so then I wouldn't like to be hosting Daily Deal banners to make a living!

I fear the same - the email and the online info, as you suggest, give us no clear indications of how this actually works in practice and blurs the relationship between our marketing efforts and actual earnings even further, creating yet more uncertainty for affiliates.

What does seem clear though from the FAQ is that we will NO LONGER be paid directly for sales on a commission basis (surely the foundation stone of any affiliate or dealership scheme!), but rather through some mystical EPC calculation which is calculated for the previous day. Try as I might, I cannot make head nor tail of this sentence,

"...although an EPC amount is posted the day after your clicks are delivered to eBay, when setting that EPC the algorithm takes into account historical data, such as the lifetime value of ACRUs and sales within the 7 day cookie lifetime, as well as the quality of yesterday’s traffic."

How does "the quality of yesterday’s traffic" impact the following day's EPC if EPN is looking for "lifetime value" (meaning 7 day cookie lifetime)? How is lifetime value calculated? Can we be told what this algorithm is, exactly? I mean, it shouldn't matter, right? In fact, it would be better if we knew exactly how this calculation was done, then we could work to provide exactly the kind of traffic eBay is looking for.

Can you imagine Avon saying to the Avon rep, "You know, what, we won't be paying you a commission on sales you refer any more, rather we will be paying you according to the value to us of the sales over a seven-day period, but you won't be told how we came by that value, but you just keep finding quality customers and we'll take care of exactly how much you get paid."?

Steve,
How is this going to affect those on pepperjam? I noticed in the FAQs that some "loyalty" programs will stay with the old pricing structure so does pepperjam fall into that group?

This looks promising and as long as we have good content sites we should stand to make the same, if not more.

Thanks

Are you serious? Of course it matters. Do you think Google is going to give out their algorithm to everyone? Of course not... too many people would game the system and it would become meaningless. If EPN gave out just exactly how their algo works, it takes away the whole point of moving to quality based pricing - to weed out the scammers.

On the low CPC question, would each campaign be looked at individually or it's a total EPC that would trigger a flag? For example, some folks could have a site that creates lots of clicks but not many sales because of the high ticket items they may be offerring. Then they have a different site that does ok in epc. But the 2 together could make for a very low epc.

And what's a sustained period of time? Days, weeks, months?

Steve, where and when can we see the preview of our earnings with the new system?