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Originally Posted by karup
In my opinion, it is unethical for a review site to offer a site owner a higher score if the site owner is willing to give the review site's surfers a discounted price. Don't give me this bullshit about price affecting the score. Your job is to review the site as is, so review it as is, don't offer a better score for doing your surfers a favor and making you look better.
We were offered a better score by The Best Porn if we were willing to reduce our price for their surfers. I'll be honest, that pissed me off. Here they are trying to be all ethical & filled with integrity, yet behind the scenes they are trying to make deals that have nothing to do with a site's quality & true rating. Wouldn't we be fucking over our longtime members that have been paying $29.95 per month for years if we gave TBP surfers a discounted price? Wouldn't we also be fucking over our affiliates that have been supporting us for over 8 years? Thanks, but no thanks, not interested in any bullshit & behind the scene deals to improve our ratings. We've got more integrity than that.
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Hey Jeff! You bring up solid points.
The idea to offer special discounts came after programs like Flynt Digital started offerring webmasters $9.95/mo memberships and payouts of $20 per signup (vs. standard $29.95/mo memberships). Our users ate it up, and we later found many sites willing to setup discounts for our users as well. It almost always produces more revenue for the program and us (we take revshare usually).
Does cutting prices screw current members? It's a matter of opinion. Promotions (especially based on referring new customers) exist everywhere online and offline. Restaurant.com is a good example online. You can go there to buy dining certificates to specific restaurants at major discounted rates. Customers can use a certificate to a specific restaurant once per month and repeat as they wish.
Does offering such discounts WHILE acting as an independent review site compromise our integrity? It's definitely a unique situation and one we put a lot of thought into. But the bottom line is, every site has the ability to set their price however they wish. Whether it's a standard price, or a discount price, we judge and score it accordingly. Price obviously makes a difference to users, and we believe it should factor into the scoring. Every site has equal opportunity to offer whatever price they wish (discount or not). The choice is up to the webmaster, and I respect their decision either way.
Do we ask for exclusive pricing? Absolutely not. We're not asking the affiliate program to do something special only for us. If they want to give all their affiliates the same opportunity, then that's cool. To us, it's easiest when it's built into the affiliate program (like Flynt, Pimp Roll, and a few others).
We're all trying to be original and bring new ideas to the table. This is one concept that has been working very well and we'll continue to build on it. It helps build our user retention and generate more referrals. Does this give our site an advantage over our competition? You bet, but nothing is stopping them from doing the same. Are we in this to make money and establish long-term loyalty? Absolutely.