It was bound to happen. A few days ago I (and surely many other eBay affiliates) received an email from eBay announcing the unveiling of their very own affiliate site (dubbed eBay Partner Network) and their April 1st departure from Commission Junction, a ValueClick company. May 1st is the final cut-off date for the affiliates to complete the migration.
That means many sites like this one will be busy porting their application over to the new eBay platform. That is specially true of sites (again, like this one) that leverage eBay Developer API's to search and display relevant eBay items on their pages.
While I'm sure this is sad news for Commission Junction and ValueClick, I wonder what took eBay so long. This is a company with vast resources and talent and hardly in need of a middle-man company to handle their affiliate transactions. While eBay has been lurching, companies like Google and Amazon have gone on to produce numerous services geared towards affiliates and developers and have reaped the rewards. As for the affiliates both offer solid in-house products in the forms of Adsesne (Google) and Amazon Associates. Perhaps eBay's stalling is indicative of some internal synergy problems coupled with some recent high profile departures.
Thankfully for eBay, their core auction business seems to have remained intact and it would provide a solid platform to launch some of these new initiatives. We'll see if eBay can finally catch up with the rest of the titans. Meanwhile many of us will be busy migrating our little affiliate sections to this new platform. More info on affiliates.ebay.com.
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