When I Talk, Apple Listens
Or so I would like to think. Seems that the fine folks over at Apple finally realized that their affiliate program had one giant and horrific flaw. Namely that if a person looking to download some music from iTunes via an affiliate link did not have iTunes installed yet, clicking the link would throw the user a mysterious and awful error page rather than default to an iTunes download page. I pointed out that by offering the iTunes download page in such a circumstance, Apple could potentially gain many new iTunes customers from the people who were clicking the links presumably to purchase the music. It seemed silly that iTunes would just dump them into the abyss of the Internet instead.
If Apple and Linkshare were smart, they would at the very least bounce out those that did not yet have a working version of iTunes to a page where they could download the program and purchase the song that they were looking for.
It seems that they have finally done something about this, and added a very very slick looking page between click and download that offers the user two buttons (one for iTunes users, and one for new potential iTunes users). You are welcome Apple.
Personally, I would like to think that my post on this made a difference and until someone from Apple or LinkShare tells me otherwise, I am going to continue to think this.
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You are so smart.