The board-game site that got kicked off Amazon Associates — and survived

The board-game site that got kicked off Amazon Associates — and survived

Month 1: a board-game review site doing 24k visits and $680/month, 95% from Amazon. Comfortable, lazy, single point of failure.

Month 3: I got the email. Amazon closed my account over a 'qualified purchases' threshold I'd technically met but they disputed. Appeals went nowhere. Overnight: $680 → about $40 in salvageable display revenue.

That was the worst month I've had in this game. Three years of links pointing to dead tags.

The turn was unglamorous: I exported every outbound link, found the 40 highest-traffic posts, and manually swapped Amazon links for a board-game retailer's direct affiliate program (6% vs Amazon's 3%) plus a few publisher direct deals.

Month 7: same ~25k traffic, revenue $620 — almost fully recovered, and now on programs that pay double. The new program even had cookie windows of 30 days vs Amazon's 24 hours.

The takeaway: getting banned from Amazon felt like a death sentence and turned out to be a forced upgrade. If one program is 90%+ of your income, you don't have a business, you have a liability with good months.