Welcome back to the Subway! In this post, we’ll be taking a brief look at how eBay changes affect blogs hosted on Blog Subway and indeed all other blog hosts that allow folks to create and manage their own blogs without them needing to own their own domains.

The first changes came about last month, where eBay made policy changes that affect all their affiliates who make use of free blogs to promote eBay items. Where before the changes affiliates had a pretty broad spectrum of places they could display ads channeling traffic to the eBay site and earning a commission on sales, that practice has been severely restricted.

Affiliates can no longer serve eBay ads on domains they do not own, either using RSS feeds, propriety software or ebay’s own widgets. Instead, affiliates are restricted to serving these ads only on their own domains that are registered in their name. This is so that eBay can more easily track where sales are coming from, or so they say. That means you can’t use your Blog Subway blogs to serve eBay ads using the revenue sharing system we have in place. It also means you can’t use places like blogger blogs, or any other free blogging platform.

Strangely, your Squidoo lenses can still display eBay ads as long as you use their own modules and not RSS feeds, which means you don’t directly get a cut of your sales. Same goes for Hub Pages, although in their system you do get a direct percentage of the sale.

What it really means is they have hammered yet another nail into the coffin of their affiliates, in their apparent drive towards keeping more of their sales revenue for themselves and not sharing it with the affiliates who drive most of the traffic to their website. Make of that what you will, but more changes came shorty afterwards.

Now, with the latest round of changes, affiliates no longer earn a percentage of the sales they generate. Instead, they are paid for the number of clicks they generate from their websites with earnings increasing if those clicks produce sales. Its a little more complicated than that, but if you are an eBay affiliate, you’ve doubtless already read their own explanation and if you’re not, then it doesn’t apply to you anyway.

So there you have it in a nutshell. The main message we want to get across here is that if your blogs were displaying eBay ads, then you must remove them! You won’t get paid for any clicks and you may jeopardize your EPN account, so don’t be slack about this or you may cause yourself more grief than you need!

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