last message from April 18 states

The eBay US team has been working to solve the tracking issue that began on Saturday April 7th.

A fix was implemented over the weekend and early data is pointing to an overall improvement.

Additional data is required to confirm that the fix is complete. We will update you as soon as we have confirmation that tracking is fully restored.

At that point, we will assess the full impact of the partial outage and calculate the make good.

This means they’ll just credit an arbitrary amount of money, based on your past performance… you could as well have referred that $80,000 sale and would not get money for it.

AuctionAds which was invented by ShoeMoney and is now run together with TLA is actually based on the CommissionJunction based AffiliateProgram of eBay – and they sent out a not so happy mail two day’s later

began on Saturday April 7. These issues affect revenue share and ACRU performance. The exact scope of the issue is not fully known by eBay. When the notification first went out eBay thought the fix was going to be forthcoming. We communicated with eBay and made the decision to wait to notify our users until a fix was completed and the lost revenue credited. Unfortunately the tracking issue still hasn’t been fixed, and it doesn’t appear that a fix will be in place shortly. As a result, the credit can not be determined until the problem is resolved.

We understand your frustration in this matter and while it is not a problem with AuctionAds we are extremely frustrated as well. We fully understand that receiving a bonus credit is never the same as knowing what your real stats are. [...]

Now, technical probs happen – shit happens anyday – but how broken can a system be, that a major corporation like eBay is not able to just FIX IT within a couple day’s time?

I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that the archived TERABYTES of clicks need to be migrated, but that wouldn’t take THEM from registering new commissions…

Having been in the software development and OLTP business for more a decade I REALLY do not understand what the eBay guys are messing around here… I feel it’s a big mess!

What’s notable is the fact that ebay does not close this auction, which is obviously an attempt to support click-fraud…

If you read up the forums some people complained about it already, but it seems ebay does not care.

The auction is in a pretty german english – but the message is frigthening

You simply can enter an Internet address to the appropriate field, to this you enter the number of desired clicks and time interval between the clicks. The X-TREM Blaster takes care of the clicks for you or to the start.

So you could really point it to only one site and cause a nice traffic spike there. That then increased the CTR and causes all alarm bells go off at Google. And if you are unimportant enough I suspect you simply get a “you are banned for invalid clicks” mail from Google, because it’s obvious that the surge of clicks came from those proxies the tool uses….

Another sad story to be added to the “Google Bowling”-repertoire … and 38 people already bought that tool!

[via Google Adsense Buster]:

The german eBay Partnerprogram (of ebay.de) offers eBay Relevance Ad – a pay-per-click system being implemented by affili.net , obviously one of the bigger affiliate program networks in the german language area.

They pay 15 Euro-cent per click, which is currently between 18 and 20 US cents – which is really quite nice…

puzzled by having missed the launch in August (ok – was on vacation, but I expected some buzz in the keep up afterwareds) I was trying to find something comparable in the US/UK area and it seems this is a pioneer project for the german market… didn't find anything in english so far.

MarketingWonk – Internet Marketing and Advertising News

Toyota Motor agreed to become the first exclusive automotive sponsor on eBay, the online auction site. The article says we can expect more of such deals in the very near future, since automakers are becoming less and less satisfied with TV advertising costs relative to results.