Amazon Video Widget Program Terminated

Amazon killed its Video Widget this morning. Sunsetting fully-working affiliate tools simply due to low usage cannot be a high priority for Amazon at this flush time. I would guess that it was closed down due to reasons other than low participant uptake. Sometimes, low-level tools are shut down because the number of complaints aren’t worth the fixes. When I wrote about the Video Widget in the Spring, a concern was the conflict between uploading a ‘review’ video and then making affiliate fees off it. It would have been possible to trash competitive products to promote your own. Alternatively, possibly people were taking advantage of a free hosting platform and uploading personal videos. Since you have to associate one product to each video, perhaps manufacturers objected to having their products associated with unscreened, irrelevant videos. Here’s one by me:

Another reason to sunset a working product would be if an improved, or conflicting product is due for launch. This might be the case since they’re allowing you to leave up your old Video Widgets. If I find other discussions about the closure, I’ll update this post.