Quote:
Originally Posted by spazlabz
I think shaving was a thing of the past. Sure there may be a few programs out there that do it still but I think it is something that was much more prevalent in the past. Back when people with zero ethics were making piles of cash easily and were greedy for more.
[snip]
Most of the bigger sponsors are honest and hard working and if an affiliate knows of one that isn't then that affiliate should let others know.
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On the other hand consider that affiliates can be like a bank. Say you make $100,000 profit per month but suddenly that number is down to $90,000. One way to "fix" that might be to skim 10% off your bottom 80% of affiliates. Times get tougher still and you'd be down to $70,000 if you didn't skim. So what can you do? Maybe you can up that skim/shave to 30% then. And so on and so forth until you get to the point where your affiliates finally all leave because you've been stealing too many cookies from the old cookie jar. It's a trap for dishonest sponsors really.
As far as talking believe me I'd love to but it's hard to prove without going way out and taking extreme measures to prove it. Here's one for you but no names (Don't ask. Will neither confirm or deny). I'd bet a testicle they were shaving me around 60% - 80% from the numbers. I sent them some known excellent quality hits for a few days which usually convert PPA no worse than 1:10. Now I watch stats like a hawk when I first sign up with a sponsor so keep this in mind. Can't give away too much without revealing them but these guys have two categories. They pay at the agreed rate for certain HQ traffic but under different terms for the other non-HQ traffic. Well I discovered that the non-HQ traffic (that they did not have to pay PPA on) converted about as I suspected around 1:8 but the HQ traffic from the same sources which they did have to pay per action on surprisingly converted near 1:90. On top of that click counts were low. A few days into it I think someone might have suspected that I was watching close or tracking clicks so suddenly all at once I noticed a bunch of clicks were dumped on one day into my stats (about equal to what was missing the last few days).
It told the story like a book. You'd look at the non-HQ stats and see high volume and the expected ratios but if you looked at the HQ stats (which they would have had to pay under PPA terms) it was totally off. After some days finally the non-HQ stats started to match the HQ stats (for the worse)...right around the time when all the stray hits were suddenly dumped into their stats.
What would it take to prove this? It'd take test signups all sufficiently documented, expert witnesses (to testify that it appears a shave algorithm is in place and to document that there were no known conditions to explain the test signups not registering commission, etc), and perhaps a subpoena to the people who wrote the backend so that they would have to testify under oath and also get the source code. Hardly worth it in my case. I lost maybe $40. I'll just move on. But if you're sending these clowns thousands and thousands of hits a day you MIGHT be losing a lot if they are doing the same to you. Watch out. Think this is rare, really?