A lot of affiliate marketers have made a fortune out of promoting Amazon products using pay per click engines. But as of May 1st, 2009, the U.S. affiliates won’t be making any money off of the Amazon Associates Program. Amazon has announced that they won’t be paying fees to PPC marketers which should be a big blow to a lot of affiliate marketers:

After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks.

This change applies only to the Associates programs in North America. If you are conducting paid search activities in connection with one of Amazon’s Associates Programs outside of the US and Canada, please refer to the applicable country’s Associates Program Operating Agreement for relevant terms and conditions.

This is a big decision by Amazon.com but there could be a couple of good reasons behind it. It could be that Amazon is finally feeling the heat from high PPC costs, and by lowering the competition it expects to pay less for their PPC leads. And let’s not forget that direct PPC marketers don’t provide any added value to Amazon. I’d be surprised if Amazon made the same decision about bloggers (unlike American Express). Bloggers and niche marketers provide added value with their content, so as long as the tax issues don’t catch up with Amazon, non-PPC marketers should be safe.

Your take: did you expect this decision by Amazon?