My post earlier this week, “California to Stomp on Small Business Owners“, has spurred a lot of online retailers and affiliate marketers to contact me to find out exactly how they’re going to be affected by the pending legislation in California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Tennessee, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina and possibly now Florida.
While I’d love to talk to each of you individually, I’m falling way behind in getting back to you and my day job, so please consider this my personal apology.
That being said, Shawn Collins just put up a brief 2-minute video explaining the threat and implications of this unconstitutional “Advertising Tax (also known as “Amazon Tax” or “Affiliate Tax”.)
In the video, he further explains what you can do to help fight this legislation and resources available to make it easy.
So whether your an online merchant, affiliate network, advertising network, affiliate marketer, online publisher, or simply care about protecting the U.S. Constitution, it’s imperative that you take action.
When all this comes down in your state, be sure to note how your representative(s) voted and then put them out of a job at the next election if they voted against your livelihood.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for posting these out there Shawn and Missy. Its a shame that this blatant abuse of terminology is allowed to happen.
Were there any impact reports done on how this has affected the NY income tax and joblessness due to this "amazon tax"?
It's a losing proposition all around. Merchants will close their affiliate programs in those states to avoid the tax implications. The small businesses marketing these merchants in those states will see a decrease in their income and subsequently pay less income tax to the state. There's absolutely no logic in any of this. The biggest obstacle is educating the legislators to understand it all.
This will have the biggest impact on eBay, Google, Ask.com, Shopzilla, NexTag and other companies who rely on advertising revenue (cpc or commission). I think companies like Shopzilla, NexTag, Linkshare and CJ will be forced to close offices in California and relocate out of state if they expect to be paid advertising revenues by out of state retailers. It will also affect publishers who rely on ad revenue sharing with companies such as Google, e.g. many newspapers. Advertising revenue overal will decrease to these Big California companies because to avoid nexus, no out of state entities will pay to advertise to consumers in California.
FIGHT THE AFFILIATE ADVERTISING TAX http://blog.mediatrust.com/2009/04/internet-adver…
affiliate marketing is being attacked and is a significant part of the performance marketing segment of our industry. The internet tax bill is structured so it can touch everyone in the industry who are part of the performance marketing ecosystem. affiliates, merchants,advertisers, service providers, search engine, ad networks etc all get hurt by these State tax Bills.
It is very important that the community understand the reach and gravity of this tax as it can literally wipe out 100’s of millions of dollars in industry revenue. it odes not create more tax. in fact it sucks more income out of our economy as all the big merchants are killing their programs in States that adopt the tax.
i hope everyone will help spread the word thru our industry and help fight this
Thanks for posting these out there Shawn and Missy. Its a shame that this blatant abuse of terminology is allowed to happen.
Were there any impact reports done on how this has affected the NY income tax and joblessness due to this "amazon tax"?
All of this has happened so fast and I'm unaware of any impact reports that have been done. There is however a thread on Abestweb here: http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=105869 showing a portion of the merchants that closed up their programs in New York to avoid the tax implications. Thousands of affiliates were affected by this.