Geek Habitat

I won’t include the company’s name (yet), as I am still holding out a thin hope that they’ll finally come through. Suffice it to say, this is a company that I’ve dealt with on a professional level for years. I send them customers and web traffic, thereby making them money, and I receive a small commission on any *new* customers I send them. I don’t make a lot of money from them, but the service they provide is a value-add to my members, and a time-saver. (No, it’s not Amazon… or Google… they’ve earned their lumps a long time ago, whereas this company seems to succeed by sole virtue of receiving government and U.S. state contracts.)

Anyway, I realized in late November 2007 that they’d so drastically changed their website (without informing their affiliates) that they’d FUBAR’d 45% or more of my links to them, rendering them both useless to my users and non-earners/$0 commission to me. Further, they’d added a whole slew of additional content that my users would benefit from, and that they’d earn more income by receiving inbound links to, yet they also failed to inform their affiliates.
I asked them for updated affiliate links for all of their inventory (we’re not talking Amazon.com, remember, so the “inventory” is on the order of maybe 700 or fewer “items.”)

Since then, I’ve received everything from quick replies assuring me the updated links are forthcoming to scoldings about what business hours are (last I checked, business hours on the web are 24/7, that is in fact why people SHOP and DO BUSINESS ONLINE, after all!)

Well, here we are in yet another new month and I’ve had it. I am ready to cut and run with these guys, and I’ve given them a deadline of close of business on Monday. If they can’t deliver after all this time, they’re F-I-R-E-D!

At this point, I’d rather forego the affiliate revenues we earn through them (not a lot, but not merely change you’d find beneath your sofa cushions, either) because that little bit of $$ has been far surpassed by the amount of money and productive time I am *losing* due to the time sink that results in all the recurring, get-nowhere, communications with them.
And, no, sadly this company has no competitors in the USA thanks to the aforementioned Federal and U.S. State government contracts.