I've been busy working on my own projects, but noticed the chaturbate skin and posts here and looked into the program to potentially promote it.
I think this is a perfect example of where a company fails to plan properly and doesn't get the guidance they need in an area that they appear to have little to no experience in.
I'll keep this simple and to the point. You pay people, up to $1 during your promo period when they make a free account depending on the country they are from. I think the first place you failed is making this crystal clear to affiliates. Most think of your site like most cams sites where they will make commissions from sales, and they look at your site as one big traffic leak. I understood what you were doing, but most people here obviously did not, so that should have been crystal clear from post 1.
After the looking into it, the only way I would send " free joins" to the site is via an api where I know I am getting paid to deliver each member. Simply sending them to the front page of the site via an affiliate code is crazy imo.
Any affiliate with a little knowledge and experience will notice your lack of chat host online and know right away that they going to lose a lot of money sending traffic to that site. Since they are only paid when a person does a free register to the site, what incentive does a surfer have to join something (even thought it is free) if there is no girls online to view. However, what will likely happen in many cases is the surfer doesn't see anyone online (or anyone worth chatting with) but he does see a ton of ads to other cam sites, some of which even look like hot girls live on cam right now, so what is the surfer going to do??? A free join to your site because he wants to waste his time to enter in his info so he can chat with no one, or click a banner and go to another site that actually has live girls on it? Which in that case you making a lot of up sells and the affiliate isn't even making his $1.
Having little to no selection of girls online does help the site make a lot more money and affiliates less, because the site basically is one big up sell. I really don't think this was intention. In the long run it benefits Chaturbate more to make the site sticky and get repeat users vs just being a one stop shop to up sell affiliate traffic for free.
I am sure they spent, and I assume wasted, a lot of money by paying for the skin here and launching a site with virtually no one live, a couple recorded videos and a few dudes. With any cam site, even free ones, you need to have a good selection of girls live before you even think about trying to get affiliates.
It's amazing to see companies work on big projects, spend lots of money but fail to get the proper guidance needed to make sure they do it 100% right. One little thing wrong can fuck up the whole project. In the future, find someone (there is a couple people here for cams) that has a lot of experience in niche that your project is in and hire that person to make sure everything is done correctly. And if you did hire someone who did not point all of this out to you then they should be fired. This is a huge mess up for a cams site, especially one looking to get affiliate. Even if it is a "free" cam site.
