Affiliates - Unofficial PSA: You can no longer send traffic via paid ads

Envato has done it again. We recently received a Policy Violation from Envato's affiliates team regarding a policy violation. We were confused since the clauses they were referring to didn't exist on their official policy: http://ift.tt/1mZZRaE

Here's what they mentioned in the email with a made up rule that doesn't exist in their official affiliate policies.

Linking directly to ThemeForest or any of our marketplaces or items from your Paid Ads on Google, Bing or any search engines. This would be a violation of our PPC policy.

Upon further enquiry, they admitted it's a new rule. How disgraceful and disrespectful to send a policy violation warning for a policy they never mentioned or no one agreed upon! How about you publish it and notify all affiliates upfront - several months in advance.

We all know how terrible the affiliate system is to begin with it only counting a referral if a user has never ever visited any of the Envato marketplaces - which is very rare. But this is a deal breaker. The lack of respect, and changing of policy without publishing or notifying is a serious disservice to Authors as well as affiliates.

Further, it doesn't matter if you're sending the paid traffic to your own item:

The problem, is if your PPC ads link to anywhere on our sites. It doesn't matter if you're linking to our homepage, your item page, your author profile or a collection. All of these are prohibited. You simply cannot buy ads for our marketplaces

tl;dr: You cannot send paid traffic via ads to Envato market anymore - doesn't matter if it's your own item.

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