The current SnapNames.com affiliate program is likely one of the better current domain related affiliate programs running was. Due to being able to market some of the best domain names dropping sure can help a marketer and likely what makes the program so good.

Starting November 20, 2009, SnapNames will be making a change with the affiliate program and switching over to the Essociate.com affiliate program.

In a way for the marketer, this is a good thing as reporting will be near real time and Essociate offers several different tools to help the marketer out.

Essociate offers a lot more tools with page peels, RSS feed, Banners, Links and more. Several of these are again good for the marketer.

Some things that are not a good thing for the marketer are the changes in the pay scale. SnapNames currently pays out 20% on net proceeds.

The new scale pays 20% on "New" customer purchases and 5% to existing customers based on the net proceeds.

Now I market both to domainers which are likely already customers at SnapNames, but that doesn’t mean they would of seen or made a purchase on a specific domain name if I didn’t point it out. There is no way to prove this, but I know it happens a lot. These purchases will change to 5% instead of the now 20%.

I also market to people who are not considered domainers and would likely become a "new" customer based on a specific domain that is up at auction. Clearly getting a "new" customer is one of the hardest. This will pay 20%.

Another bad thing for current marketers in the SnapNames affiliate program is that all past links will no longer work. This sucks, as I have links all over the place. It will take a good deal of work to go back and find all these links and change them out to the new program.

I hope that the affiliate program stays as one of the best domain affiliate programs around but sadly it likely will not. The pay change for existing customers is going to be the biggest hit for those with domainer traffic.

Another thing, since I was aware of this change coming.. I started testing using the Essociate program and I have had horrible results. I am getting plenty of clicks but no sales. It is almost like the reporting is not working but I checked with Essociate several times and they said everything is working.

For an example of the very poor results, my Click Stats during this test were as follows:

Raws 8,395

Uniques 1,752

Sales $0.00

Time will tell if the change is good or bad, but right now.. things are not looking bright for the marketers.

I had wrote a little bit about the Essociate Affiliate Network here if you would like to read more about it.