Here is a post I made on AWE last week:
http://board.awempire.com/showthread.php?t=11148
DISTURBING REVELATION: AWE is our biggest competitor ... Say it ain't so
For 11 years I have run a tight-knit adult social network site. Last June I signed up with AWE / LJ after meeting Douglas at the XBIZ show in Las Vegas. LJ would be a great 'fit'
Pretty soon after I started promoting AWE I started having issues with my sales getting credited to other webmasters.
I knew this was the case because my Members -- many of whom have been with me for more than five years -- were encouraged to try LiveJasmin and email me to be included on my WebCam VIP list.
When I wrote to support to inquire why two of these sales were not showing up on my commission list I was told that they were credited to another webmaster and no other information was available. Well, that sucked.
I then wrote to the two guys and asked them if they had been to LJ recently. Neither one of them had ever been to LJ. One guy had gone to CAM4.com, but he clears his cookies / temp files / cache on a daily basis
Fast forward to yesterday.
I was chatting on ICQ with Douglas and I asked him if someone goes to a site like PornHub.com and a LiveJasmin popup / popunder appears out of nowhere, would that set a cookie?
Imagine my surprise when he said "yes"
Keep in mind that LJ cookies are NON-REWRITABLE. So, if someone gets a LJ cookie from PAID ADVERTISING on a NON-WEBCAM site, and then DAYS LATER goes to LJ INTENTIONALLY as a result of your marketing efforts then AWE get the sale.
NOTE TO AWE: Please let me know if I explained it wrong.
If this is in fact the case then I for one am VERY DISTURBED by this revelation.
Douglas tells me that this is common knowledge among affiliate webmasters.
Well, I can tell you that I was in a state of shock when I learned this. In essence AWE is BY FAR our biggest competitor.
Maybe I was naive but I thought that a surfer would need to actually visit LJ in order for a cookie to be set.
By my count I have lost approximately 20 sales out of 100. That's 20% ... One out of five.
AWE won't help one bit to explain who got the sale and how. I have several letters from other clients all saying the same thing .. that they hadn't been to LJ. Most had never been to a webcam site at all before I explained what camming was all about and how fun it was.
At the time I didn't think to ask if they had been to PornHub or some other site where they might have picked up the AWE cookie.
This "surprise cookie" revelation explains a lot and I am not a happy camper
Please weigh in on this. Is this common knowledge? Do other sites do this?
Is it something many / most / all sites do? Or is AWE a special situation in the industry?
Of course AWE has a huge marketing budget .. but do the other sites do it on some level or another?
Let's see if this thread stays up for long
Hit me up on ICQ
264-118-553