First, the good: I’ve gone through, bug-checked, and slightly tweaked the code for automatically linking to the iTMS in ecto to ensure that it works and performs searches as it should (something I’d been meaning to do for a bit now, as that page seems to be referenced fairly often by people working on that particular issue).
Then, the bad: while I love the idea of iTMS affiliation — and if I got more traffic, it might even bring me more than a few pennies here and there — I’ve got to agree with Scot Hacker that the whole shebang is really a pain to deal with. While I haven’t had to fight with the POST/GET issues that Scot is, some of his issues sounded very familiar to me…
It turns out that a lot of the links provided through the LinkShare back-end (Apple partners with LinkShare for the affiliates program; you have to use their back-end to generate your custom links) simply don’t work. See the six (currently static) album covers in the left column of the site? Only two of them actually take you to that album in iTMS. The other four take you to the iTMS homepage. All six links were pasted directly out of the LinkShare link maker, and should work as-is. This problem is totally unrelated to the POST problem — they’re just dishing up broken links to affiliates, period.
[…] I was expecting to find some kind of ad rotation mechanism for affiliates. See those static Stevie Wonder banners at the top of all the lyrics pages? I should be able to drop in a block of code and have those rotated out automatically from iTMS. Instead, the only option is for me to return to LinkShare every few days and grab some new static code. …why should this be so difficult?
[…] I’m trying to sell music for Apple here. You’d think they’d welcome all the help they can get. This whole process has been incredibly frustrating. Maybe I’ve drunk too much of the Apple Kool-Aid, but I really expect better from them.
“Insane in the Brain (Hot Tracks)” by Cypress Hill from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 5:18).
besides sometimes not providing the right links, one has to jump thru hoops, climb mountains and cross rivers just to find the place to get the quotes…just for that few cents…
Yeah, I’m not thrilled with their decision to partner with linkshare, and I’m particularly not happy about the way that if I try to put an iTunes banner on my site, 9 times out of 10 what actually shows up is a squeezed linkshare affiliate banner instead, smashed into whatever aspect ratio the itunes banner would have been. Had it been there. Which it’s fucking not.