Just an announcement that today I closed my Amazon Associates account for the Dangerous History Podcast.

There are 2 reasons I did this. First, Amazon’s commissions have continuously & drastically declined over the years that I’ve participated in this affiliate program. Near the beginning of the DHP, when I had far, far fewer listeners & website visitors than I do now, I would nonetheless often earn over $100, and sometimes even $200-300 per month in commissions. This was a huge help, especially in the early days of the show, when I wasn’t making much money from other streams – it helped me upgrade my podcasting equipment & purchase lots of books for research.

In recent years and months, however, I would only occasionally break $100/month, and most of the time I would only earn around $20-50 per month. (In fact, over the entire course of the year 2020, I only earned $437.07 from Amazon Associates. By contrast, for the year 2016, I earned over $2,000 from Amazon Associates, even though my show & following are many, many times bigger now than they were back in 2016.) That already was making me question how worthwhile this program was, considering the amount of time it takes to put in all of the Amazon links on my site and in all of the show notes, which can be quite tedious.

But to make matters worse, the second reason I’m ending my Amazon Associates DHP account is that, at the same time they’ve been continuously lowering their commission rates, they’ve been constantly adding to the complexity of their Operating Agreement for the program. It’s been getting harder & harder to be sure if I’m in compliance with it, and if I’m not, they won’t just tell me what the issue is — instead, in a recent email telling me I’m not in compliance, instead of simply telling me what the problem was so that I might fix it (if possible), they put the burden on me to send them:

“A list of the Sites/Social media handles on which your Special Links or banner ads are posted,
advertising services you are using, links to screenshots of your Site’s analytics tools that show your Site traffic and its sources, the keywords you are using to drive referrals, any plugins or browser add-ons you use, live links to your Sites, and a sequence of links that allows us to duplicate the clicks the majority of your customers make to get to the Amazon Site via your Special Links.”

They told me I had five business days to send them all of this info, or I would risk closure of my account. Honestly, it would take me forever to compile all of this & send it to them. Even if I was going to try to do it, it would take me a lot longer than 5 business days. I decided I wasn’t going to do it, and I wasn’t going to pay someone else to do it for me, either. This is an unreasonable demand, and trying to comply with this (along with continuing to put Amazon links on all my show notes posts, which is already pretty tedious) is certainly NOT worth $25-50 per month in Amazon credit.

So instead of sending them all that stuff, I preemptively closed my Amazon Associates DHP account, before they could do it for noncompliance. (“You can’t fire me, I quit!”)

So please, DHP fans, don’t try to use my Amazon affiliate links anymore. I’ll be doing my best to take them down in coming weeks. This was a good program back when I started the DHP, but the benefits have been dropping & the hassles mounting for a long time, so I’m seceding from this particular union.