Just received this email today from Andrei Marinescu, Director of Business Development at MOG regarding the switch from net 60 to net 120 terms for affiliate payments.

Dear affiliates,

I, and the rest of the MMN team, have received and answered a number of emails expressing understandable concern regarding the change in MMN payment terms. I would like to clarify some key points, to avoid potential misunderstandings:

• Ad revenue is earned by you and paid out to you on a monthly basis. The original terms – communicated during the MMN application & registration process – stated that payments are issued no more than 60 days following the last day of the calendar month in which the revenue was earned. The terms have been revised to be no more than 120 days, based on the economic realities outlined in my previous message
• For extra emphasis, payments will be WITHIN 120 days, not IN 120 days, of the last day of the calendar month in which revenue was earned. As soon as we collect advertiser payments, we will issue your payment in kind, with a guarantee that even if an advertiser is over net 120, we will pay you anyway. If advertisers pay on time, you will be paid on time (i.e., within 60 days)
• Based on conversations we are having with advertisers who are overdue on their invoices, I guarantee that the payments some of you were expecting to receive by the end of December will start going out in the month of January – you will not have to wait 2 months beyond when you initially expected to receive these payments

Lastly, I wish to reiterate our commitment to you individually and the network as a whole. I assure you that we are working our hardest to collect and pay you your earnings as quickly as possible on an ongoing basis. Our goal is to pay out as close to the original 60 day term as feasible. However, based on the factors previously mentioned, issuing payments to you may take longer in some cases.

Sincerely,

Andrei Marinescu
Director, Business Development | MOG

For those of keeping up with this debacle, there was also an interesting article posted on TechCrunch over the weekend with some comments from MOG CEO David Hyman, MOG Head of Sales Alex Brough, and lots of angry Moggers.

As for me, well you might have noticed that I’ve pulled MOG ads from my site, and while I understand that MOG doesn’t “want to become a bank”, I’m not interested in being stuck holding the bag if MOG doesn’t deliver on its promises, or if it decides to change its terms yet again. If MOG comes through with a good faith payment in the first week of January like they hope to, then I’ll reconsider getting back in the network, but until then I guess I’ll be pimping Chase Travel Rewards, Levi’s and whatever else Google AdSense wants to send on over (they pay net 30 by the way).

PS I suppose the upshot of this whole thing is that through the concerted efforts of a bunch of pissed off affiliates and a fair amount of negative publicity, MOG seems to have budged from its “hard” net 120 day payment terms, to a more flexible “within 120 days” time frame. But really, while it sounds nicer on paper, wanting to pay me sooner and having the ability to are still two entirely different things.