Retailers not paying smaller commissions

A recent article from Internet Retailer, based on the recent 2007 AffStat Report, would have us believe that commissions are going down... to which I'd like to offer a more realistic reason for why the reports shows a drop in merchants that pay high commissions.

When the report first started the merchants that took part in the AffStat Report were more the larger merchants, with larger programs and larger pay outs. Over the past few years more and more merchants have participated in the report leading to a lot of middle sized and smaller merchant programs adding their data. This simply means that the results have tilted from a bias towards large merchant data towards a more balanced spread of affiliate programs from all types and sizes of merchant.

Commissions are not going down, there are just a lot more mid sized affiliate programs around today and they are not paying $5,000 a month to their top partners... not yet anyway!