Normally, I refrain from spreading drama from other boards to GFY, but this is too fucking hilarious to deprive GFY of its enjoyment. Actually, I am sure to the affiliate he fucked its not very funny, but I know I sure got a charge out of reading it and wondering "What in the fuck is this guy thinking?".
It seems that - according to threads raging on at least two other boards that I know of - Paul Markham openly admits that he banned at least one and maybe more affiliates who sent him traffic he couldn't handle that was selling but had really high ratios, as in like 20,000:1, and his reasoning is that it slows his tour down and somehow costs his other affiliates money. And the traffic was making sales. Now, keep in mind Paul doesn't have a minimum acceptable ratio stated in his rules, which he needs to have if he is gonna pull shit like this.
Here are some thoughts from Paul on this, as quoted from the thread on that other board:
So basically, Paul has shitty servers and/or has inadequate infrastructure or both. Anyone whose pages stop loading due to an extra 25K hits over an entire month is, by any measure, cutting it far too close to the edge. Now, my thinking is, if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you cant handle the traffic demands of serving FHGs, Banners, VHGs, etc - then don't fucking offer them. If you need to upgrade your servers, then you need to fucking upgrade your servers and you do it, you don't start picking off affiliates who are sending you sales and following the rules.
Bandwidth and servers are so fucking cheap its not even funny. How much bandwidth does 25K hits consume? Maybe 100 GB on the high side? 1 MB is 300 GB over a month and most people are paying what, $20/MB for their bandwidth on the high side (I am paying much less, and I am sure most others are, as well), so what, the bandwidth consumed there cost him what, about $7. A respectable server, quad core dual Xeon with decent RAM runs what, $3K, and will handle how many million hits a month and should last for what, five years? Give me a fucking break. You were making profit on his sales, maybe not as much as someone who was converting at 500:1 or 50:1, but its profit none the less. No fucking excuse for pulling the rug out from under the guy.
But Paul bans this affiliate who is not breaking any rules, just because his traffic sucks. It wasn't mentioned in the threads I saw whether or not Paul is going to even pay the affiliate for sales generated to date. Usually, when a sponsor kills an account they also keep the earnings, so thats interesting.
I know if a sponsor did this to me, I'd be awfully damn pissed. Putting up fucking sponsor links takes time and effort. And for some sponsor to tear the rug out from under me just because they don't think my account makes them "enough" sales and thereby forcing me to spend more time to tear down thier links, I know what I'd do: I'd send all the agreements to the lawyers and see about trying to make the sponsor pay for the time involved in taking shit down because some asshole decides he doesn't want to serve my account.
So Paul, lets hear an explanation. This is bullshit and your program sucks if this is the way you operate. Apparently, Paul only wants whales in his program (don't they all?) and doesn't value the guy who sends a signup here and there and tries to promote his shit.
