THE SHAKEOUT CONTINUES [Author: Lum the Mad]

The rumors we’ve been hearing all week have been confirmed, as UGO publicly acknowledged to gamers.com today that they were in fact demanding that their affiliates accept less money for advertising placement. According to one anonymous webmaster, only $1 CPM – in other words, if a site makes 500,000 page views in a month, it gets to keep $500. In most cases, that’s exactly half what UGO was paying before, and for many sites, that’s simply not enough to pay the bills.

I have to talk to the guys who host my site. They wanted us to start making $1,500 a month extra by March or they were going to close us down. Once I tell them that they aren’t even going to get our regular check for December, they might just pull the plug the same day.

No word on how this will affect pretty close to almost every gaming site left in the industry.

The anonymous UGO official quoted by gamers.com admitted that in most cases, this does in fact put UGO in breach of contract and open them to possible litigation. He responded, however, saying that even without UGO meeting their promised contractual obligations to its clients, its affiliates would still benefit from UGO’s professional hosting snort, exceptional bandwidth guffaw and state-of-the-art ad banner marketing rolls on floor laughing, dies of coronary, news piece ends abruptly