Originally Posted by Adraco

Of course the affiliate manager will do a monthly check of incoming traffic, analyze and see from where the largest chunk of traffic is coming from and how it's converting. That's just normal business sense. If the program can find out you are getting your traffic from a paid advertising spot, which they themselves can buy at a much lower cost than PPS/rev share with you - any dummy would do that!

The affiliate model exists paartly to expand onto and into sites which other people build and gain traffic/search ratings on. Without the affiliate model maybe ones program would never be listed on that specific site. So a program owner is ok with giving away a few images and movie clips, since it will render a number of signups and spark an interest. If it was only my own program site, hardly anyone would know about it, but with a lot of links, movie clips and images spread all over the place, brand awereness starts to spread among the surfers. And for someone to promote my site like that, I would gladly share 50% of revenue, because I basically don't have to do any work, it's just added revenue coming in without my own involvement.

But if a certain site has paid advertising spots, anyone could buy these. Then it makes no sense to pay someone 50% of revenue for them to use my banner, to send to my tour and then more or less make a risk free profit there in between. So any sound, normal program, should of course look at and try to figure out where traffic is coming from and if the source is publicly available then try to snag it/bid for it/outbid others for it.

Just look at Godaddy for example. They explicitly prohibits their affiliates to bid on Adwords like "Godaddy" and other keywords which Godaddy themselves are bidding on, becuase they don't want you to raise the click cost and to gain mnoney from their brand recognition.

You have mentioned here before that you do good from buying ads or traffic from different sources, and have mentioned Juicy Ads as one of those. That's an easy way of making a good cut if you have a tight campaign and some good sponsors to convert for you. But no one does this for the heck of it. If the sponsor can figure it out, then they might just as well do it themselves and increase their own profits instead of sharing the wealth.

Wouldn't you?