AdMoolah News and Views

If you are a Text Link Ads affiliate, you probably received an email like the following yesterday. If you are not a Text Link Ads affiliate, I recommend you join now.

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

Homepage URL

–

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx

Starter Promo URL

–

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

This is a very strange move for two reasons.

First, why would they go through tinyurl? Their original referal links were something like: http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=xxxxxx. These link aren’t that long. This new scheme only save 14 character per link. They could have easily saved another 4 character by removing the “www.” from the front of the referral URL, which means they only save 10 character by going through tinyurl. They could have saved another 2 characters by changing the “ref=” to “r=”. Now its only 8 character longer. Is that really a big deal?

Second, why make the old links expire? To me this will just piss off a lot of affiliates who now have to go and change all of their links. The cynic in me is thinking that Text Link Ads is counting on the fact that many of the links won’t get updated, and therefore TLA will no longer have to pay out affiliate percentages on those links?

Text Link Ads usually seems like they are a pretty good organization, but this email completely baffled me.