Fandango Affiliate Program

Fandango is a website where you can buy movie tickets online. My wife and I use the site pretty regularly, because it's fast and easy and we don't have to stand in line at the theater. It occurred to me today that maybe they have an affiliate program worth taking a look at. So I hopped over to the site, found the link that read "affiliate program", and read their affiliate program page.

Let me go on record now as saying that I hate affiliate program pages that don't outline their commission structure front and center. What on earth would I possibly be more interested in than whether or not I could get a decent commission rate from a program? After reading through the sales hype at Fandango, and taking a look at the "apply to be an affiliate" link, I realized that this program was run through CJ. (Commission Junction.)

Great. I like Commission Junction just fine. So I go log in to CJ and do a search for Fandango, eager to get signed up and start making money selling movie tickets. Then I saw it.

EPC = $0.73 over the last 3 months. Huh?

Then I read the commission structure. These guys pay a whopping 10 cents per movie ticket sold through your affiliate link.

A dime.

I'd make more by running Google Adsense on a movie site. This is one of the most ridiculously low commission rates I've ever seen. Heck, even at 5%, a movie ticket commission would be 3 or 4 times that amount.

Who would be silly enough to promote an affiliate program that pays a dime commission? It MIGHT make sense if you got commissions on all the customers' subsequent purchases too, but you don't. It's a one time commission. One ticket sale, one thin dime.