Time Out: It’s Not Just For Kids

Doing affiliate marketing through Commission Junction’s affiliate network has made me a little bit of money. Nothing to write home about, but enough that I can see the potential.

Commission Junction is one of the biggest and best-known (if not the biggest and best-known) of the affiliate networks out there.

So I just don’t understand why they can’t run a web site that works consistently. Over and over, every few days, the CJ website times out when trying to log in or run reports. Some days I can’t log in at all. I’ve contacted CJ’s support desk — all they tell me is to clear my cookies or restart my browser. Dammit, it’s not my cookies or my browser. I’m a reasonably savvy Internet user who has tried every possible thing I can do on my end, including visiting the site on a new browser that has never even been to the CJ site before.

It’s not confidence inspiring. It makes me wonder how much affiliate tracking isn’t being tracked, and how many affiliate commissions aren’t being committed.

Google’s AdSense program isn’t known for open communication with publishers, but at least Google puts a notice on their AdSense pages when they’re down for maintenance. When CJ had its reporting go out for about 2 weeks (over the holidays, no less!), they didn’t even put a notice on the site until at least 10 days into it.)