One of my best revenue sources lately has been eBay Partner Networks. The way it works is that eBay will give you money if you send them buyers. It used to work that you got a chunk of the auction fees when someone was a high bidder on an auction. My HarpAmps.com site used to clean up because amplifiers typically go for over $500. I devised some fancy eBay searches that made finding a good amp easy, and they worked because my surfers are buying thousands of dollars worth of amps every month.

The problem is that eBay has fiddled with a good thing. They decided that they would use “quality clicks” to filter out the people who would have bought an amp anyway, even if they did not use my links. As a result of this “quality”, my revenue was significantly cut. I still get enough money that I won’t throw out the eBay clicks, but the days of big checks are now gone.

Starting tomorrow my eBay partner network income will be about 1/3 of what it was. I was having fun making up new searches for my surfers to find stuff on eBay, but it is a waste of time now.