Story: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050905/sfm048b.html?.v=1

This could be an interesting one for affiliates. Linkshare has had quite a few problems lately, so I don’t know if this will make things better or worse. Rakuten must have big plans; they paid $425 million for it. Like many other affiliates, I can think of lots of things I’d like to see from Linkshare - less trouble with payments, drop the visual confirmation from the signin, quit messing with the validation nonsense that no other company seems to need… lots of things to fix there.

Fortunately, it is my understanding that they aren’t going to mess with things until after Q4, which just makes good business sense. You don’t play with the major shopping season. What happens after that could be interesting.