Quote:
Originally Posted by Snake Doctor
Not so. People always say the program spends this and the program spends that and the affiliate spends nothing.
Bullshit.
The most expensive commodity in this scenario is traffic. That's what affiliates have that affiliate program owners want.
Try buying traffic straight up on a per click or per sale or per impression basis, and odds are it's going to cost you alot more than the 50% of the revenue you're giving to affiliates, PLUS you have to pay out upfront and take the risk that you'll convert. With the affiliate program you only payout as the money comes in.
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That is where you are wrong and one of the main reasons that my personal sites are primarily affiliate free and at most invite only. Affiliates were the most expensive element of the whole ordeal. Traffic itself is not that expensive nor that damn hard to get. Actually most affiliates have required the site owner to do almost all of the damn work anyways to collect the traffic, then the affiliate stamps their name on it and gets half.
Content costs have always been a lot more expensive than traffic has ever been. Even hosting expenses have been more expensive than productive traffic has been.
Now you also skipped over the whole issue of asking how to keep track in a simple way, since I was actually interested. Even though it has always been the case that revshare sites did members upsells if they wanted - just no uncredited cross sales, or exits.