Forkbeard

Oh, my, yes. You're doing a great job at staying in touch and fighting fires on the most vital (which is to say, money) problems. It makes a world of difference having somebody who answers emails and can show progress!

That said, there's a sense in which we will inevitably be talking past each other on these threads because of the different time scales we are working at. I've been a Cybernet/Kink affiliate for fifteen long years. Outlived all the affiliate managers. I'm the one that sold the kinkydollars.com domain to you guys. The only person in your organization (that I know of) who has been there longer than me is Peter himself. Peter is the one consistent thing. The buck stops with him. The last affiliate manager invoked his name and directives as the reason affiliate issues were not then being resolved, and when she did, Peter wasn't answering affiliate emails (at least not mine). So when I'm being frank (and I always try to be fair as well) about Kink.com as an organization and what it's like to do affiliate business with, I'm talking about what it's like to do business with Peter over the long haul.

And that, quite frankly, has gone downhill. For reasons. Some of which are understandable and easy to see even from the outside. But it's still true.

It was great doing business with Peter in the early days when everybody was making money and he was buying the most awesome piece of real estate in San Francisco.

It got less great after the economic crunch when "people not having money to spend" overlapped with "people stopped buying porn". By 2012 there were indications that Peter was worrying really hard about how to leverage his real estate outside of porn, and thinking less hard about how to make more (and more awesome) porn. (I could provide citations.) Somewhere in there we started seeing periods (in between the excellent affiliate managers that Peter was still hiring when he could find them) where affiliate concerns started dropping through the cracks. The business would lurch in a new direction, the links would break, and there wouldn't be any notice, much less any effort put into shielding affiliates from the worst effects of the lurch.

Then the quality of the affiliate managers started to slip. Carla was the worst ever; she literally refused to respond to any substantive problems with anything except snippets of soothing bullshit. It became clear there was nobody up higher who had affiliate issues on the radar. Before you started getting involved in the problems, I had exhausted every channel of communication, without useful response.

Meanwhile from press reports it now appears that leveraging the fancy real estate has finally become Peter's primary business focus. That's probably a pure business necessity; depending on how he has things financed, failing to do that in the current porn-selling environment might easily be a business-killer.

Peter's been juggling lit sticks of financial dynamite for almost a decade now, and the crowd keeps tossing him new ones. It's no surprise that his attention has sometimes wandered away from "take good care of the affiliates" -- we're a declining fraction of a declining part of his business. I have no criticism of that, but it's a reality that affiliates have to be aware of. If his attention has wandered back toward us -- which, Jesse, your current hard work and promise of commitment to affiliates suggests may be the case -- Peter's track record still indicates his attention may wander away again, perhaps the next time there's a tectonic shift in the San Francisco real estate and business climates. Those are the long time scales I'm talking about when I say that affiliates have to protect themselves from the way Kink.com handles affiliate traffic during shifts in their business. It wasn't a criticism of anybody currently on the team except Peter himself, and possibly not even one of him. It's just my honest evaluation of how the Kink.com organization responds to business challenges, and how it prioritizes affiliate concerns during those challenges.

I hope so! It remains concerning, though, how the company keeps talking to the press about plans for the armory and the departure of porn production, but the company hasn't got very much to say about where that production is going or how it will be organized. I'm quite concerned that we've got a lot more "recycle the old shoot and pretend it's a new one" to look forward to, combined with what is starting to look like a shift in focus to third-party studio content, perhaps very similar in appearance at first due to talent spinning off. If Kink.com plans to stay in the business of making porn (as opposed to distributing legacy porn and third-party porn and "growing the brand" with third-party content) those plans aren't very visible. Is there anything you can say in public about them? Because that would be reassuring.

That's all good news. As a "best practices" suggestion, any change that requires affiliates to change links to avoid painful traffic leakage should be announced in a separate email that includes a phrase like "LINK CHANGES NECESSARY" in the subject line. (This is almost never done because it tends to call unwelcome attention to whatever business change just happened -- but it's a bare minimum if affiliate care is truly the priority.)

Thanks again, Jesse, for all that you've been doing!

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