Below is the email….

Today we’re announcing Quality Click Pricing, a new payout structure designed to further reward the affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay and who send valued buyers to our sites.

What’s Quality Click Pricing?

Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads. With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions. The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive. Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic.

When will this change take place?

We plan to phase the introduction of Quality Click Pricing to ensure existing publishers have enough time to understand how this affects them.

• New publishers that join the eBay Partner Network as of September 1st will be paid out under the new system. This includes all publishers joining as they transition from TradeDoubler and affilinet.
• Publishers that joined eBay Partner Network prior to September 1st will remain on the current pricing system until October 1st, when they will begin to be paid under the new Quality Click Pricing payment structure. Before October 1st, and starting the last week in August, existing publishers will have access to a preview report to see how their new payouts compare with the existing payment structure for them.

How can I find out more about this change?

We know that you may have questions about Quality Click Pricing, so we have put together several resources to give you more information about it:

• Read more about this change and some of the reasons behind it on our blog, including a FAQs document.
• A new set of pages on the eBay Partner Network site that explain how Quality Click Pricing works in more detail will be available later today.
• Two new videos that explain the concept of Quality Click Pricing (one available today and a second that will explain new reports on September 1st).
• In addition, we will hold two live webinars to explain the change and give publishers the opportunity to ask questions. Find out more about the webinars.

We will also be on the boards more frequently over the next few days to answer publishers’ questions.

We are very excited about the launch of Quality Click Pricing, as it will allow us to reward publishers who are driving high quality, engaged and incremental traffic to eBay. We are also committed to continuing to invest in helping our publishers succeed with eBay Partner Network, and to ensuring that everyone is rewarded fairly for the value they generate for eBay.

We look forward to working with you on this new endeavor. Thanks for your continued support!

Sincerely,

Steve Hartman,

The eBay Partner Network