Following last week’s news of Amazon suddenly shutting down referral fees to affiliates resulting from PPC traffic, discussion seems to have moved to a recognition that much of the traffic about which Amazon was concerned was not resulting from PPC arbitrage on keywords but instead may have been a product of trademark squatting.

If that’s the case, it means that Amazon took the view that this was traffic they should have been getting anyway and that the PPC affiliates weren’t adding any value. By killing PPC affiliate activity, Amazon can now use the search engines to help police its trademarks and won’t have to pay the affiliate commissions.