Today I generated my last sale for Yes Asia, my 35th top commission earning merchant of 2008.

The entertainments retailer, which I have an Exclusive code for, have been studying their analytics and have signalled their intent today to kick me off their programme.

Effective from 17th July YesAsia will no longer allow affiliates who run discount voucher/coupon sites to promote the program. Please note that if you are a content site which also lists vouchers or a cashback site then this will not affect you, only those sites which are focused mainly or exclusively on vouchers.

I may be free to promote Yes Asia on my Befuddle content site which has a global audience but not on ShopCodes, where it rightly sits.

Only last month I won a Yes Asia incentive competition and won half a dozen Japanese pop cds. I’ve not listened to them but gave them as a gift to my Japanese housemate.

Today I’ve since removed the links to Yes Asia and replaced them with CD Wow! but in retrospect I should continue to promote Yes Asia but without listing any codes [albeit they won't pay me].

My reasoning is simple. My site ‘Shop Codes’ includes shop codes but 30% of my top 20 performing merchants don’t issue codes or I have never published a code for. So by that logic, if I have never published a code for say Kiddicare am I Kiddicare content affiliate? There’s content on the page. I’ve argued the same logic in the past with Mothercare and AlphaRooms [for which I've never made a sale but that's beside the point].

It appears the issue in this case, is the over writing of content cookies by users searching for codes at the basket stage.

This is highly likely to be true and below are the Yes Asia search terms that have brought people to my site.

My Yes Asia page, which is linked to from the Shop Codes home page has been viewed 90 times in the last 30 days, with 73 uniques.

The average time for people to spend on the page is a staggering 2 minutes and 33 seconds. This is more than twice the time people look at my Dixons page.

Here are the top 50 entrance keywords that attract people to the site. Interestingly people have been specifically searching for my exclusive code or rival merchants.

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What I’m listening to right now: Andy Lau Wonderful World Concert Tour Hong Kong 2007 Karaoke Live.