Commission Junction Shuts Down!

August 11th, 2007

WTF? Commission Junction was becoming one of my favorite affiliate service providers. Then suddenly today the site totally choked. I’m lucky I have a little site I run for fun. But many businesses, including Commission Junction, are gonna lose thousands of dollars.

It appears these guys in the UK tried contacting them.

What happens is this: websites like mine who have affiliate links have big hole in their pages where ad banner images used to be, like on my cheap airfare website page. And then if someone clicks the hole where the ad used to be, the get nothing. The servers that forward the link clicks are down too. And the reporting servers as well. It is impossible to see the main Commission Junction site or any of the reporting and management pages.

Many pro sites build code into their ad serving so that if one network does not show ads, another network is pulled up. I bet many more sites will be implementing this now!

For my part I still hope Commission Junction can build their affiliate offerings. They do a pretty good job and provide a nice alternative to Link Share. Seems like a good thing to have both options available at this point!

UPDATE: as of 3 PM Pacific Time CJ seems to be up and serving ads! Hopefully they’ll have some kind of information about what happened.

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