There will be an upcoming big change to Commission Junction on June 23, 2006. They will completely retooling their linking system to include new JavaScript links instead of the traditional links.

Many affiliates think the move is not very considerable and in some sense, hastily done. The ValueClick company has just dropped a bomb on their affiliate publishers, of which countless of Web pages suddenly won’t work anymore.

Frank Gerstenberger, director of product management for CJ said that the company will notify their clients six months in advance before the links go dead. They anticipate what will commonly happen every time there’s a change.

So what is the benefits of using JavaScript links?

• They may be able to support rich media with dynamic capabilities liks automatic rotation, etc.
• The dynamic feature of JavaScript links allow advertisers to change links without publishers do any work on their part.
• Offer defense against ad blocking software, so links won’t get blocked.
• Will call any future link type, such as video.
• Can still be modified in all the ways important to you, including modifying destination URL, appending with SID, encrypting, changing destination URL and designating hyperlink location in text links.
• Are common to most web browsers and also can be easily incorporated into any web page.

E-mail, which doesn’t support JavaScript, obviously will still use the legacy links. Datafeeds and search marketing will continue to use HTML links too. Publishers have to declare themselves as SEM publishers in order to access keyword links.

This move particularly divided affiliates into e-mail, search or site segments so advertisers can better market particular programs to consumers.

The problem is, there probably is no way you can do a search and replace to migrate the old links to the new one. Affiliates have to search a particular product, generate their links and replace every occurence on the Website with the new links, manually.

Sources: ClickZ News, ReveNews.