Amazon.com Breaks Affiliate Code for Some Image Ads, Requires Fix

Just got this email from Amazon.com about their Associates Ad Unit Migration:

Hello,

As part of our continuing effort to improve the Associates program’s products and services, we are making some changes to our technology platform. This platform change will require you to replace some older product links, banners, and widgets you currently have hosted on your website as they will no longer be supported after July 31, 2015. Text links are not impacted by this deprecation.

Action Required
We ask that you replace or update the impacted ad units prior to July 31, 2015. The links require the following update that can be facilitated through your CMS (content management system). You may make these replacements at whatever scale you are comfortable with.
- Find and replace ws.amazon.com with ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com
- Find and replace rcm.amazon.com with rcm-na.amazon-adsystem.com

Keep in mind that starting August 1, 2015, any remaining legacy product links (text + image, image-only), banners, and widgets will be served with non-clickable public service announcements that will not send traffic to Amazon, impacting your referring traffic and potential earnings, if not addressed. On September 1, 2015, these legacy ad units will no longer render, thereby creating a broken link on your website.

Getting Started
To assist with this migration, we have created a dashboard on Associates Central that identifies those product links, banner ads, and widgets that are impacted by this technology change. Be sure to visit Associates Central, https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/link-migration/dashboard.html for instructions on how to get started.

Please review our FAQs for more information on this migration. Should you have any questions or need assistance, visit the Customer Service page for contact information,
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/contact

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this deprecation may cause.

The Amazon Associates Team

To paraphrase, go into your blog and find and replace every Amazon ad that uses the deprecated code in each blog post, or you'll have a lot of broken links after September 1, 2005. Unfortunately, my CMS, Blogger, can't easily accomplish this. If you've got Wordpress, you can do a global search and replace.

Amazon Affiliates Central will help, providing this link to show every blog post that contains, what will become, broken ad code.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/link-migration/dashboard.html

It shows me 230 broken links:



Note:

If you click the above link and get an error, it might mean you are not signed in or have no broken ad units.

Go to your associates central dashboard and look at the right sidebar

or

Try clicking it again, or refreshing the page

It errors out some times.

In practice, I went into the first example and found that text links do not need to be changed, but image links do.

So I changed the code and ended up with a blank image.



Oh man. What a mess.

New Ad
This new ad below, created with the new affiliate code, will still work after September 1, 2015.


New Ad: James Taylor

Sweet Baby James!

Good luck.