eReaderIQ no longer Amazon.com affiliate eligible

[sufue]

When I logged on to eReaderIQ this morning, the following splash banner was on their home page. I'm pretty naive about Amazon's affiliate program, but this sounds harsh...

Important Changes Regarding Our Service

As of June 10, 2016, eReaderIQ is no longer eligible to participate in the Amazon.com affiliate program. What this means is that we are no longer able to monetize this site simply by having users click on our links.

Because of this, we will need to rely on our users' support to keep the site running. Our short term goal is to generate enough user support to cover the costs of operating the site.

Click Here to Donate

Long term, eReaderIQ could become a subscription based service. If it does, we will offer a free tier for our light-duty users, and pricing will increase based on how many books or authors you are tracking with our service. We will also look into an 'unlimited' pricing tier for users with larger lists.

As of right now, eReaderIQ is free to use, and will more than likely continue to be free for browsing. We do not have any credit card information for any of our users, so no charges will be made without prior permission from our users.

We thank you for your support and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We will try to make the transition as painless as possible. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

[Blossom]

Wow. I wonder why they are no longer eligible?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Wow. I wonder why they are no longer eligible?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Nate has the details here:

http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/0...t-ebook-sites/

Basically, they were in violation of their affiliate TOS.
Much like the free ebook sites of years past, they make their money sending people to download free or cheap ebooks and collecting fees when they buy other items. Which is fair, more or less, from a website, but not via email.

Note that Amazon isn't telling them to stop sending emails. They're just enforcing the pre-existing rules and refusing to pay for that kind of "referral".

Bookbub sends out those same Kinds of emails but they make their money off the publisher not off Amazon.

[Atunah]

I have used this site heavily for years to notify me, not only of price reductions, but also of books that are being kindlelized after being out of print. I also follow a lot of authors. The only emails I get from them are those price reductions/authors and now on kindle.

I don't get any paid ad based emails anymore from anyone.

I absolutely love the chrome extension. I send them a small donation and hopefully others will too. At least those of us that have used them for so long.

[sufue]

I totally agree - I have long waiting to be Kindle-ized, author and specific book watch lists, and I love the extensions. With the amount I figure eRiq has saved me, I am totally willing to pay them a subscription fee (reasonable) for their services. I have belonged to goodreads for a while too, but have just never been able to warm up to the site, possibly because my TBR lists are so long that the last thing I need is more reading recommendations . I too just sent eRiq a donation.

Without sounding too cynical, I wonder if Amazon Smile is also meant to cut into the affiliate program. I haven't noticed, but does the affiliate program work with Smile?

Originally Posted by Atunah

I have used this site heavily for years to notify me, not only of price reductions, but also of books that are being kindlelized after being out of print. I also follow a lot of authors. The only emails I get from them are those price reductions/authors and now on kindle.

I don't get any paid ad based emails anymore from anyone.

I absolutely love the chrome extension. I send them a small donation and hopefully others will too. At least those of us that have used them for so long.

[sufue]

Oh, and a question for a moderator, does MR get in trouble if I go buy other things at Amazon after using one of the links (non-free) here with the MR tag? I've tried to do this, with both MR and eRiq, for a while. Is this a problem?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by sufue

Oh, and a question for a moderator, does MR get in trouble if I go buy other things at Amazon after using one of the links (non-free) here with the MR tag? I've tried to do this, with both MR and eRiq, for a while. Is this a problem?

Well, I am not a moderator (nor am I the guy in charge of running the website backend).
But I am pretty sure I know the answer to this question anyway -- it isn't MR specific.

As I understand it, you only get in trouble if you refer people for free books, and then they buy other things.
Or too many of the referral purchases are free things.

...

Or, I guess, as per this thread, if you send emails out rather than having them come to your website to click on referral links.

[Cinisajoy]

I can answer that. With the Amazon affliate program, the changed it years ago to where the site had to have at least 1 paid purchase per ever so many (20 at first but that may have changed) free downloads.
Talked to an Amazon affliate when this first changed.

I don't think Mobileread has anything to worry about since they have roughly 1 free download link for every 5 or so paid links.

I have a suspicion I know why ereaderiq got their affiliate tag pulled.

@Atunah, I quit using ereaderiq many months back, when he started referring mostly scamlets.

The guy actually told me exactly how he picked his referrals.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

I can answer that. With the Amazon affliate program, the changed it years ago to where the site had to have at least 1 paid purchase per ever so many (20 at first but that may have changed) free downloads.
Talked to an Amazon affliate when this first changed.

I don't think Mobileread has anything to worry about since they have roughly 1 free download link for every 5 or so paid links.

I have a suspicion I know why ereaderiq got their affiliate tag pulled.

@Atunah, I quit using ereaderiq many months back, when he started referring mostly scamlets.

The guy actually told me exactly how he picked his referrals.

So there's more to the story than just emailing links, huh?

[Cinisajoy]

I am off to pay bills right now but will come back later with more details.

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

I have a suspicion I know why ereaderiq got their affiliate tag pulled.

@Atunah, I quit using ereaderiq many months back, when he started referring mostly scamlets.

The guy actually told me exactly how he picked his referrals.

Not sure I am understanding what you are saying. I sign up for specific books to follow for price reductions, I follow specific authors for same and I follow specific books that have not yet been kindle-ized. I get emails on all of those. Unless I purposely follow a scam author, I won't get any emails on such books.

I do go to the site once a day for a quick look at what the price reductions overall are in the specific genres I like with specific parameters. So might there be some scamlets in there, could be, but I don't see a lot of them and just scroll. Since I drill down to sub genres, its usually just a list of maybe 2 pages each day to look at.

So I am a bit befudding how the site refers scamlets. I set the length in the parameters when I do my daily quick browse of overall price reductions.

But mainly I have big lists of specific books for price reduction and now on kindle. I also like being able to see with the chrome plug in the overall price history of a book. Gives me an idea if the current price is a good deal or if a book only goes on sale rarely.

Its why I use the site. I control what I see. Its why I do not like any of the ad based emails like bookbub or any of the others. Anyone can pay to be on it and I don't want to see that. I want to see anything that is on sale, even if the author hasn't paid to be listed. Authors, especially in genres I like, have been throwing 1000's and 1000's of dollars to push their books up the list, collecting a gazillion street team reviews, and ads everywhere. I want to find books I am interested in and that are good, not those that are sold like a slap and chop. .

[latepaul]

I'm another who only uses it to follow specific books or authors (actually author I think). I browse Amazon and use the extension to follow books I like but are too pricey right now.

I haven't signed up to things like BookBub because despite entering my preferences etc it always still feels like spam, whereas eReaderIQ feels like a service.

[worktolive]

I don't even know what a scamlet is. I don't get any recommendations or unsolicited emails from eReaderIQ.

I go to the site every day and scroll through the list of new price drops in the two genres I'm interested in. Aside from that, I have a list of books that I'm monitoring for new price drops. Whenever I get an email notification from the site about a price drop on a book I'm monitoring, I do a little happy dance, and then go off to buy the book.

I will happily pay a (small) subscription fee for this service. They've saved me lots of money over the years.

[Cinisajoy]

Ok 1st off a scamlet is one of those little books that have been copied and pasted right from the Internet.
If you just followed specific authors and got the emails on those ereaderiq was great.
If you went to his website and looked at the daily freebies in non-fiction, there were a ton of scamlets.
An example would be "The Greatest AMERICAN cookbook. The blurb was something to the effect of the best recipes from AMERICA.
Well now, I acknowledge there are many Vietnamese and Indians (originally from India) here in America but neither Vietnamese or Indian cooking originated in the States.
Yes the fried rice and the curry recipe sounded fabulous but that is Asian or European cooking. Not sure what continent India is on.
All the recipes were Asian.
Note: This book had all 5 star reviews. All written in Asian Style English. All said Great American recipes.

Note this was a short book and obvious c&p because all the recipes used different measuring systems and different styles of writing in the instructions.

Now I don't blame Christian but the scammers found a way to skirt his requirements to feature a book.

Note: there were always many books like that. Always with only 4 and 5 star reviews.
I will not tell the other requirement out loud.

What I figure happened was the author's friends would click on the link from his site. Download the book to get it up in the ratings.
Then either knowingly or not knowingly about the Amazon affliate program, buying more stuff from Amazon and ereaderiq would benefit.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Ok 1st off a scamlet is one of those little books that have been copied and pasted right from the Internet.
If you just followed specific authors and got the emails on those ereaderiq was great.
If you went to his website and looked at the daily freebies in non-fiction, there were a ton of scamlets.
An example would be "The Greatest AMERICAN cookbook. The blurb was something to the effect of the best recipes from AMERICA.
Well now, I acknowledge there are many Vietnamese and Indians (originally from India) here in America but neither Vietnamese or Indian cooking originated in the States.
Yes the fried rice and the curry recipe sounded fabulous but that is Asian or European cooking. Not sure what continent India is on.
All the recipes were Asian.
Note: This book had all 5 star reviews. All written in Asian Style English. All said Great American recipes.

Note this was a short book and obvious c&p because all the recipes used different measuring systems and different styles of writing in the instructions.

Now I don't blame Christian but the scammers found a way to skirt his requirements to feature a book.

Note: there were always many books like that. Always with only 4 and 5 star reviews.
I will not tell the other requirement out loud.

What I figure happened was the author's friends would click on the link from his site. Download the book to get it up in the ratings.
Then either knowingly or not knowingly about the Amazon affliate program, buying more stuff from Amazon and ereaderiq would benefit.

The technical term for that is "link farming".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
Old scam on the web, not so old (apparently) in the ebook world.

And if they were used for that, knowingly or not, that is cause for blacklisting and not only by Amazon, for bad policing at a minimum. Link farming is bad for everybody. Search engines ban websites for it.

These things are rarely as simple as they first appear. Especially when money is at stake.