EPN announced today that as of today, August 1st, it will be placing publishers in a tier based program to calculate the payouts for ACRUs. For those of you who don’t know, an ACRU is when a new user signs up with eBay, bids on, and wins an item. The ebay publisher is paid a certain fee for every signup like this each month. Under the old ACRU structure, publishers were paid a minimum of $25 for each ACRU, based on the total number of ACRUs for that publisher.

Under the new ACRU system, EPN publishers will be paid between $1 and $50 per ACRU, mainly depending on the quality of the signup – as determined by eBay. Each publisher’s “quality score” will be updated each month on the 9th as eBay processes new data.

This is definitely bad news for any members signing up for EPN after today, as everyone will fall into the $1.00 ACRU category by default and remain there for at least one month.

At first glance, this looks like a blatant move by eBay to make more money by reducing the ACRU payouts to their publishers. Although the maximum payout has increased to $50.00, it may only affect eBay’s top affiliates, where people in the middle may receive far smaller payouts for ACRUs. On the flip side, this may simply be an attempt by eBay to weed out incentivised signups that don’t earn them any money in the long run.  If the main target here is reducing incentivised activity, EPN publishers may not see much of a decline in their monthly ACRU earnings, and may even see some benefits.

There’s no doubt it will take a few months to start seeing any significant data one way or the other, especially as existing publishers will stay on the current ACRU payment structure until November 1st.

What are your thoughts?