Clickbank are one of the largest affiliate organizations in the world, but news from Clickbank often took a long time to filter out of the organization, often only through people with inside connections such as Harvey Segal at the Clickbank Forum.
Also being a private company they have never been obligated to provide financial details in public, so press releases and news isn’t in any way a legal obligation compared to public companies.

The first substantial post, other than an initial welcome message is by Clickbank CTO Monty Sooter who delves into some of the new features coming in the future.

• More internationalization
• Client to client communications
• A new publisher referral program
• Extension of electronic payments to our clients

The last point is already coming to fruition. Adrian Ling (author of easyClickmate) seems to have been the first with the news of Clickbank XACH support for users outside the US

Adrian has also published full instructions on the information you have to provide to Clickbank

XACH is available for the following countries now

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Mexico
• The Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Spain
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom

One massive caveat that Rosalind discovered is that Clickbank direct deposits must be made in local currency, so if you are in the UK, you would get deposits in GBP. You couldn’t get payment to a USD account even if it is a UK bank account.

For people in the US this might not be a significant change, but for smaller publishers who didn’t meet the requirements of Clickbank’s Wire Transfer service and didn’t want to pay a $35 fee for each transfer, this is a major change.

In the past I have avoided promoting Clickbank products because of the hoops I have to jump through to cash checks. Endorsing cheques (yes I do know how to spell it the English way too) when you live in a different country to your bank is a pain, plus I normally have cheques posted to my UK address.

The XACH service apparently is free and they use bank rates of exchange – That makes Clickbank quite attractive for a payment processor and affiliate management system for international publishers – no worries about tax paperwork for your affiliate army.

You might think you receive your money with PayPal faster, but that is not always so clear for those living outside the US. It takes 5-7 days to withdraw money from PayPal, so Clickbank works out only a little slower.
For an affiliate promoting many affiliate products that are paid through PayPal, the merchant may only make payments at the end of each month, and I have personally experienced payment delays of up to 3 months.

Clickbank does hang on to a rolling percentage of what is withdrawn, but if you are actively promoting Clickbank products, that isn’t a major problem – I don’t think it is too much of a burden for merchants either.

Last year I had one good friend contact me for advice on Paypal – it was more for moral support than anything else – they had something like $50,000 frozen by Paypal and still had to meet affiliate obligations – something like that can destroy a business – and this was a situation which had been going on for over 6 months.

A lot of the bigger internet marketers now use merchant accounts and pay their affiliates by check – I really don’t like checks.

Sure it is easy to earn yourself a quick $40 or whatever by promoting it, by dropping text links all over the place such as this one:-
Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Or you can use some other creatives such as a nice sidebar widget (might not show in a feed reader)

Amazon’s Success Is At Least In Part Their Affiliate Program

For years affiliates have been driving traffic to Amazon. They don’t get the benefit of recurring or lifetime commissions, the affiliate program is effectively make a sale on the visit or get nothing, but because the products were mass market, some people made a fair amount of money from Amazon, and many still do.

Will Kindle Kill Affiliate Sales Of Books?

If it is successful, it could certainly have an effect.

People who buy Kindle will be the mass consumers of information, the people who buy a lot of books, especially people who have taken training to read faster such as I did at Rich Schefren’s Acceleration 2 Seminar, assuming Kindle has the features to allow faster reading.

These aren’t your “one book for Christmas” types, these are people who buy 20 books because they are going on a trip somewhere, or researching a specific topic over a few days.

Kindle Is A Direct To Amazon Sales Cycle

Amazon is cutting out the middle man. Just because you might make a $40 sale now, those people who buy the device for $400 are quite possibly no longer going to generate affiliate revenue.

It is quite possible that such people go to Amazon direct, but they are also the kind that might be influenced by a review of one book somewhere on the web, go to Amazon following an affiliate link, and buy 20 related books.

I have been monitoring the discussion around Kindle, I know Robert Scoble has mentioned making money from people reading his blog on Kindle (30% ?) but that seems like it might be only a select few. We are not going to see “Subscribe On Kindle” buttons on the vast majority of blogs any time soon.

• I would have expected Amazon to provide a lot more information on Kindle to Affiliates and what it means to them if there was a money making opportunity (not just selling the device).
• I would expect residual earnings for selling a device which will provide a residual income for Amazon.

How does this launch affect other players in the ebook market such as Clickbank?

I keep reasonably close tabs on the affiliate marketing industry, and I haven’t seen anyone rejoicing the introduction of Kindle. Have I missed something?