Mozy Affiliate Program Shutting Down

Eric Nagel

10 years ago

I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

I received a call from Mozy’s affiliate manager that they will be shutting down the Mozy affiliate program. This seems to be in direct opposition of what everyone else is doing (starting or promoting their programs) and a big advantage to the other cloud backup programs in the industry.

What the hell do these four guys have to do with Mozy’s affiliate program shutting down? The guy on the left is Mozy’s affiliate manager, who was just at Affiliate Summit West.

This is kind of a big deal to me, as I started my path as a fulltime affiliate with the Mozy affiliate program back in 2008. In fact, it was August 28, 2008 that I earned my first commission from them (and have gone on to generate over $500,000 in commissions since then; I even went to visit Mozy back in 2010). My site, Cloud Backup Reviews, was a product of Jeremy Palmer‘s “Black Ink Project ” (and has been extremely neglected the past couple years). It opened me up to lots of opportunities for which I’m extremely grateful.

Back in 2008, 2009 and even 2010 online backup was huge, but the land rush is over and volume is fading. Mozy shutting down their affiliate program is just another hurdle thrown at this affiliate niche.

Carbonite, despite providing a service and never needing to charge sales tax, kicked out New York State affiliates (including myself) a couple years ago. CrashPlan only recently relaunched their program on ShareASale after the GAN program shut down last year.

Every time a revenue source is taken away, affiliates must get creative and figure out how to monetize the traffic they have. I’ve backfilled with paid placements (since gone) and AdSense along with internal “rewards” programs (which gave me quite the Amazon.com gift card balance in 2012 / 2013).

We ~~online~~ cloud backup affiliates have also seen a Google penalty for domains which were named “online backup,” causing us to all switch to “cloud backup” names back in 2012. These hurdles caused me to start a Google+ Community just for cloud backup affiliates.

Since it’s shutting down, I’d like to share one of my favorite stories about the Mozy affiliate program:

My family & I were on vacation, and everyone was relaxing at the pool. I decided to go back to our room and do some work. So I opened my laptop and checked my Mozy sales. I had a single Mozy Pro sale (which paid 40% commission) for over $10,000 – that’s a $4,000 commission. I closed my laptop and went back to the pool – vacation was paid for!

Thanks to James for the years of service, and Nate prior to him. Guess I’ll focus on CrashPlan’s affiliate program for now, while I decide what I’m going to do with this site.