Quote:
Originally Posted by Barefootsies
They can, and have, watched and monitored or questioned affiliates where their traffic comes from for years. So they may not be able to duplicate it exactly, but they can easily enough reverse engineer it to get some decent results chief.
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LOL. Also, good luck with that.
It's all about areas of relative expertise. Take mine, which is blogs. I've been porn blogging for nigh on seven years now, and in all that time, I haven't seen a single sponsor-run blog that's worth a bucket of warm spit.* Oh, sure, they're beautiful by the standards of porn sites, but that's what they look like -- acres of sterile pornsite updates. Which is to say, dull as dirt. Nothing that compels the readers to come back day after day ... for years.
The skill set of "can run a pay site" and "can write a decent blog" don't overlap very often -- and when they do, the guy running the porn site
doesn't have the bloody time. Could he hire a decent blogger? Sure. Does he?
Never. Or, if he does, he insists on sterile pornsite update posts instead of real blogging, with diversity, humor, and unexpected quirks.
Years ago I tried to talk Kink.com (before they were kink.com) into hiring Violet Blue to write a blog for them. Was she willing? Yes. Did they do it? No. Why not? God only knows. Instead, she got a job with Gawker Media putting Fleshbot on the map (along with a few other people, it wasn't a one-woman job by any means). She could have done Fleshbot, only better, with the Kink.com brand all over it. (Note well, when Gawker Media laid off her and Jonno, Fleshbot went completely to crap. To make this work you have to both hire and retain.)
I guess what I'm saying -- and I'm pretty sure every serious long-time affiliate here will back me up on this -- is "Reverse engineer
this, mutherfucker!"
I could run down similar arguments with regard to SEO or any of the other ways that affiliates generate traffic.
You can't "reverse engineer" specialized expertise. All you can do is hire it, and to do that, you've got to pay it more than it's getting now. So there's no financial win there.
*Footnote: In truth I
have actually seen a few decent sponsor blogs. They mostly exist in the world of sex toy sales, where the programs seem to have a much more realistic view of what a marketing budget should look like. There are also one or two decent ones in the BDSM world, from producers who are so tiny and micro-niched that the program owner really can find the time to do a "real" blog while running his business. But, for every half-way decent program-run blog, I can point you to a couple dozen crap ones.