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Originally Posted by cadele
Interesting! Thank you. I thought the percentage was only on the one sale and hadn't realized it was for other purchases on the same day. Wow.
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I'm not sure it is all day but it is definitely all session
If you use an affiliate link to look at a book and instead buy a TV the affiliate gets a commission based on the price of the TV. The session-based commission is needed to allow for comparison shopping and alsobot recommendations. (A camera review site links you to a Canon model and you end up buying an Olympus instead. )
It works beautifully for most non-book affiliates but free ebooks have long been a bone of contention.
Early in the decade there were dozens of websites devoted solely to highlighting free ebooks and mining affiliate fees from same-session purchases. Amazon cracked down and those sites are mostly gone. Other sites have to be careful about balancing content and links.
More recently, as pointed out above, Amazon has been getting heartburn over newsletters and mailing lists.
They keep tightening the screws because they see those businesses as taking money out of their pockets without generating enough compensatory sales. Also because the deal brokers distort the discovery process and they can become king makers, the online equivalent of the front table payola of B&N and other stores.
They don't want to end the session-based commissions for book links because there are still plenty of honest review sites that do earn their commissions by generating offsetting sales but it might come to that.