13 Jan 09 US Search affiliate program leaves LinkShare for Commission Junction

I’ve been keeping track of advertisers who manage their affiliate programs through the various networks such as Google Affiliate Network, Commission Junction and LinkShare amongst others and we just received official notice from Amy Harrin that the venerable online background investigation company US Search is moving from Linkshare to Commission Junction effective January 15th… (this Thursday!)… Amy is the dedicated affiliate manager at US Search.

US Search is pretty one of the top tier online services to do background checks (from about $5 per search, depending how much detail you are looking for) on people – it’s pretty popular amongst people wanting to check out potential dates on the online social networking and dating sites.

We manage programs under both CJ and LinkShare and I highly prefer CJ – for the unique and simple reason that the user interface on Linkshare (parent company Rakuten) is consistenly sluggish and slow and a bit too annoying to easily navigate. That being said, Linkshare has a very high quality roster of advertisers and you simply cannot ignore them in your monetization strategy. Just be ready to sit waiting for report updates (in Flash) to generate. It’s not that CJ is that much better – but faster enough to merit more frequent visits to check on performance reports.

So US Search will be live on CJ as of January 15th – here’s the official notice all US Search Linkshare partners received:

From: affiliates@ussearch.com [mailto:affiliates@ussearch.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 8:35 PM
To: ***************
Subject: US Search.com LinkShare Affiliate Program Closing 1/15/09

Dear US Search Affiliate,

US Search would like to thank you for your participation in our affiliate program. Unfortunately, we have made a business decision to suspend our program in LinkShare. We will however be launching a new affiliate program in Commisison Junction (CJ) on January 15th. Please feel free to log in to your account if you already have one in CJ, or, you may create a new one so that you can continue to work with us.

We will pay for commissions earned on net orders received through a publisher link based on the terms of our agreement, plus any earned outstanding payments currently owned to Publishers. Publishers sales commissions will not accrue after January 15, 2009. If you have changed your contact information, please update your profile at LinkShare so you can receive your final commission check in a timely manner.

Pursuant to our Publisher Agreement between US Search and you, this shall serve as our formal written notice to shut down our US Search Publisher Agreement. Per our agreement, you are required to remove any and all banners, buttons, text links, product images and store fronts that link to US Search.com by end of business day January 15, 2009. If you have any questions regarding this manner, please contact me at aharrin@ussearch.com.

Once again, we thank you for supporting our affiliate program, and we appreciate your compliance with these shut down provisions.

Sincerely,

Amy Harrin
US Search.com Affiliate Manager
*******@ussearch.com

Related posts:

1. AIG Direct suspends their affiliate program on Commission Junction … temporarily …hopefully
2. Canadian Tire closes their online affiliate program – will CanadianTire.ca survive ?
3. Official : Microsoft to close Office Live Affiliate Program

Tags: affiliate programs, Amy Harrin, Commission Junction, LinkShare, Monetization, US Search