Originally Posted by Dollarmansteve

I'll try to recreate the magic This thread was motivated by the "limited trial" thread.

Most new programs are started by people who used to be affiliates. Reality is that affiliates have a skewed vision of how sponsor programs actually work and make money. The goal of the webmaster-turned-program-owner is usually to "make the affiliates happy by giving them what they what" ie to treat their affiliates how they wanted to be treated when they were an affiliate. What do affiliates want? Good conversions, high payouts and boatloads of free content / promo tools / hosting /etc.. basically they want to pass their business costs into the program. What do all these things mean to the sponsor program? Massive negative cashflow.

There are alot of new programs coming out who claim to be "surfer friendly" while still offering PPS payouts (on trials) of $25 - $35. Secondary sources of revenues like EZclicks, Xsells, exit consoles, members area upsells, cancelled member revenue, etc are 100% necessary to operating a profitable PPS model. If these 'surfer friendly' programs do not have a very aggressive plan to recoup the revenues they choose to leave on the table because they're being "nice" then they are guaranteed to fail.

It is naive to think that a site can be built that will retain any better than the average paysite. Yes, sure there are some super micro-niche sites out there who have 10 guys out of 500 who rebill for 5 years (on no-trial revshare joins), but what about the other 98% who's average retention is probably less than 2 months? Surfers are NOT loyal to the site they join and porn is a pure commodity - to think otherwise is an attitude that will again guarantee failure.