[patio11]

The more voodoo you do to maximize the alignment of the affiliate program and eBay's long term interests -- and eBay does do the voodoo that you do so well -- the less easy it will be to understand for anyone who is on the outside looking in. My transparent, easy-to-implement, easy-to-understand hypothetical $0.25-per-trial affiliate structure is harmful to the developer's economic interests and harmful to the desire of affiliates to continue working with me.

After we switch to any of your suggestions with dynamically scaling payouts -- which eBay did a long, long time ago -- we enter a world where the payouts, seen from a vantage point outside the system, resemble black magic. That is exactly this site's complaint. They have been judged by the black magic and they have been found wanting.

There is no way to explain to them what they've done wrong because it is an emergent behavior of the interaction been Google's rankings (black magic), their own site and strategy, eBay's business practices (black magic), the underlying economy (black magic), etc. There might very well not be any person in eBay who can explain, given any amount of resources to investigate, what this account did "wrong". But they can justify, with incredible predictive capability, that systemwide the black magic generates higher average LTVs for lower average traffic acquisition costs.

Any sufficiently advanced conversion optimization system is AI. (Blog post coming up on this.)

[charlief]

Thank you Patrick. I'd like to do more research on the topic and await your blog post. As this topic pertains to eBay, it is extremely interesting.

As you mention some other ways are not impossible, but have serious problems. I agree, but at the very least, I think the status quo is not optimos. If you are starting up an affiliate scheme, it would be interesting to explore all options even ones that seem more complex or unconventional, because frankly, the ultimate black magic is a spontaneous killing of a business with no warning signs or even the converse. Either eBay wins (by getting some extremely high-LVT traffic) or the affiliate wins then loses (by getting killed). There has to be a way to a middleground.