Ogre's blog

For a year I was participating in stubhub's affiliate program. I've created relatively big and complicated PHP based site that was using their datafeed files. It had some sophisticated functionalities like validating import data, advanced events management, IP delivery, etc, etc… Today I've received email from stubhub notifying me:

"New Commission Structure

Beginning Aug. 1, we will be streamlining our commission rates to reflect specific rev shares per major sports category/genre sold. Moving forward, we will incentivize based on what you sell, instead of how much you sell. This will allow you to focus your efforts on the ticket genre that makes you the most money. This will also eliminate the wait time for performance incentives to be distributed."

What a lovely marketing bulshit: "Streamlining". "reflect rev shares". "we will incentivize based on what you sell, instead of how much you sell".

What they did efectively (again) is that they lowered the commison for MLB tickets from 7% to 4%. Isn't that great? Few months ago they lowered it from 8% to 7% but obviously their greediness was not satisfied.

Look guys (stubhub), no one wants to be incentivized on what he / she sell. We cannot create new and develop (in seo terms) new sites for your new bullshit  commision structure. I can't use my MLB optimized site to sell concert tickets. Even if I am willing to create new site for example for concert tickets -- what is my guarantee that you will not change your structure again in few months…

You (stubhub) are not reliable partner. I will move to other affiliate program as soon as I find time to change my sites.

This entry was posted by Ognyan Bankov on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 06:09:40 and is filed under Web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.