Should we switch to Amazon affiliates?

So we’re currently Powell’s affiliates, and have been since we started the blog.

The amount of $ we’ve seen from this affiliation has, to this point, been… let me count it up… $0.

One person has bought something through one of our links, and not enough to trip the payout amount.  So we’re still at $0.

Every year or so #1 IMs #2 and says, “Should we switch to Amazon?” or “I think we should switch to Amazon.”  And every year or so, #2 reminds #1 why we started with Powell’s to begin with.

#2:  the catch I found before was: “If you have not earned any advertising fees in the 3 years prior to any given calendar month, then on the first day of that calendar month we may charge you an account maintenance fee that will be deducted from your unpaid accrued advertising fees. That account maintenance fee will be the lesser of $10 or the amount of unpaid accrued advertising fees in your account.”

in our chatlog of 7/18/10, you said, “That is a big catch”

#1 is that still true?

#2 “In addition, you hereby consent to us:
sending you emails relating to the Program from time to time; monitoring, recording, using, and disclosing information about your site and visitors to your site that we obtain in connection with your display of Special Links (e.g., that a particular Amazon customer clicked through a Special Link from your site before buying a Product on the Amazon Site) in accordance with the Amazon.com Privacy Notice; and monitoring, crawling, and otherwise investigating your site to verify compliance with this Operating Agreement and the Operational Documentation. ” Yes the $10 charge is still true.

#1hm tricksy.  Well, I’ll write a blog post on the topic and ask the readers one of these Mondays and see what they think.

#2 ok, you do that

UPDATE:  We made an affiliates link, but could not get their links to work with pictures, only text.  I searched their forum but didn’t find anything useful– the people talking about images are doing something really complicated.  I emailed customer service and 20-odd hours later they emailed back saying we should look at the forum and the link has to be copied exactly, as if we weren’t doing that.  So not helpful at all.  I guess the answer is:  We can’t be Amazon affiliates even if we wanted to be.  Powell’s it is.

So, dearest readers, should we switch to Amazon affiliates, or stick with Powell’s?