jayeff

I would guess that 90% of the people who give this business a shot are gone within 5 years, many much sooner. The last couple of years in particular, we have seen a rising number of "names" leaving. In short, there are excellent reasons for questioning just about any conventional wisdom.

Conversion ratios do not matter AT ALL, but the check is only one part of the picture. You cannot usefully compare one sponsor with another unless you can evaluate the relative value of the promo spots each are given nor unless you have your own reliable traffic and click stats. Otherwise you have no way to know whether twice as much money from sponsor A than from sponsor B is good or not: perhaps you promoted sponsor A so much better that he should have earned three times as much for you.

Absolutely wrong and those who think otherwise are the ones not seeing the big picture, or more accurately, the long-term picture. Produce a list of sites you would spend your money on, or check out any of the reputable review sites. By the time you get to #50 they are starting to look pretty feeble. Now delete all the revshare sites from the list and see how many are left. Sure the best revshare sites are well promoted, but we know that more affiliates promote PPS. This simple exercise illustrates how many crap sites are being promoted by thousands of webmasters and how many millions of surfers are being exposed to all the tricks that PPS sites use to make money.

We know that none of this is what surfers actually want, yet somehow we manage to convince ourselves that we can expose the majority of them to it, year after year, without hurting ourselves. Get real. We have a global audience of people able to buy and enjoy porn without embarassment, yet after 10 years, online porn - according to the most often-quoted estimate - still accounts for only 5% of adult entertainment. We could double that in 5 years if we started behaving like business professionals instead of petty scam artists.

Of course they don't. But leaving affiliates to get on with it and hoping some of them get it right, makes no more sense than trawling for newbies with some childish board persona. Affiliates carry a cost and they offer potential. Where is the business sense in spending the money it costs - however a sponsor does it - to attract new affiliates, but then doing absolutely nothing to develop his potential. Running a business means exactly that: running it. Not just throwing some mud against a wall and then sitting back to see if any of it happens to stick.