Here you can see a few of the items I’ve sold on Amazon. The most expensive sale I referred brought in £1015 for Amazon. Even at Amazon’s lowest commission rate, without the cap, this would have earned me over £50. Instead I got just £7. I earned barely over 0.5% of the sale price for my part in bringing a high paying customer to their site.

A few of my sales which had their commissions capped. The cap just for these items cost me over £100. I bet Amazon don't cap the commission they charge on third party sales.

It’s pretty annoying but then Amazon can be fairly generous in some ways. For example Play.com pay just 2% commission on DVDs while Amazon gives a minimum of 5% up to 9% (but realistically very few affiliates will get above 6.5%). So Amazon is paying far more than double what other companies will pay for certain items. On the downside Amazon‘s one day cookie is another annoyance.

What do you think about Amazon’s affiliate rates, one day cookies and commission caps? What caps have stopped you earning what you should have?

Update: It’s good to see Ricky Gervais is with me on the Twitter backlash saying “I’m sure it’s fun as a networking device for teenagers but there’s something a bit undignified about adults using it, particularly celebrities who seem to be showing off by talking to each other in public.”

Actually I don’t hate Twitter, I hate the media which constantly go on about it despite the fact that it’s nothing special. If I had invented it I would be quite proud but wouldn’t actually expect anyone to use it. In fact I wouldn’t invent it because the concept seems pointless.

What is twitters innovation? What sets it apart from the giants of social networking in the past, namely MySpace and Facebook? The answer, it restricts you to 140 characters per message. That’s it. And that’s a positive thing!? Have I missed something?

Twitter's other unique feature: Today's Internet user is too busy to read both sides of a conversation, so just show them one or the other.

I also hated MySpace. While the idea of giving everyone an easy webpage is good, it’s not a new idea. It’s been done tones of times before, take Geocities for example (set up 9 years before MySpace, which doesn’t sound like a lot but really is in Internet terms). The reason why MySpace became so popular (in my humble opinion) is that it kept annoying you with emails giving you the impression that your real life friends would be upset if you turned down their “friend request”. If you get 20 messages from people who you know asking to be your “friend”, you can’t really just ignore them all, it would be rude. Once you do that, you’re encouraged to supply all your other friends’ email addresses so they can be spammed too. This caused a snowball effect in several ways, which I won’t go into because this is supposed to be a Twitter rant. Anyway, at the end of the day, MySpace essentially nagged people into joining.

Facebook did the same. I kind of hate it for that but it really did bring a lot more with it. Cleaver features such as tagging people in photos and being able to see your friends’ updates in one place were just a couple of the reasons why Facebook deserves credit (although it also got where it is today mainly by nagging people).

Twitter basically took the status update feature from Facebook and restricted you to 140 characters per message. Surely you can’t just steal a feature, make it worse and hope to become that fastest growing website on the Internet.  Apparently you can. On the plus side Twitter doesn’t nag you with emails. Instead the media go on and on about it. Why? Not because it’s a brilliant new way to communicate although that’s what they’ll tell you. It’s because they’ve seen the success of what went before and don’t want to be last on the bandwagon this time.

Talking of people who jump on bandwagons, I felt sure that soon-to-be Prime Minister David Cameron would be a member of Twitter. He’s not however and he had to apologise for saying “The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it – too many twits might make a twat.” It’s the best thing he’s come out with and is almost enough to make me want to vote Tory.