jayeff

It's not only the obvious answer, but the correct one. The difference between your offline metaphor and the (common) online reality, exists solely because sponsors chose to sweeten the pot by allowing affiliates to make commission on "delayed" sales.

That was probably the sensible thing to do, because without that perceived safety net, many more affiliates would keep traffic under their own control until an immediate sale were more likely than at present.

As to your general question, a surfer is mine until he leaves my site, BUT... if I persuade him to click through to a destination which only pays me on sales, then he remains "my" surfer unless and until he buys something. Wrong or right, I have to look at him from that perspective, because if my first attempt to monetize him doesn't work, I want to be able to try again with something else.

I would go further. If traffic is indeed as important as most claim, I would be a fool to burn through my visitors after one shot at selling them something, regardless of whether I fail or succeed. Thus it makes no sense to present him with links - whether to free or for-pay destinations - which are going to make him regret having clicked on them.

Which doesn't mean I think of the surfer as "mine" as such, but to return to a bricks-and-mortar metaphor, if a shop-keeper couldn't provide what a customer wanted or sell an alternate, he would far more reasonably recommend a good place to buy, than somewhere the customer would be ripped off or get poor service. The extra business to be had by treating people well may be relatively small, but it has to be more than treating them badly.