Quote:
Originally posted by fantasyman
Thank you KK - I have been forward numerous emails from Webmasters that display that this is going on and I have forwarded these emails to many large programs that pay by this model.
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You, along with every other program owner, are aware of the situation that resellers bring to the table. Yes, they mean more signups and more volume, but they tremendously lower the profit margin -- not simply because of the payouts but due to the enormous costs incurred by every per click or per signup program and how they choose to implement and run their fraud screening procedures.
The bottom line as I see it (and perhaps this will piss off some people) is that resellers need to be held accountable for their actions just like sponsor programs are.
Every day on a board, and sometimes many boards, you see claims of sponsors stealing from resellers. Do sponsors steal? Of course. A small percentage of sponsors steal, there is no doubt about it. However that same small percentage applies to resellers and consumers.
Let's say for instance that the percentage of theft is 3%... that would mean that 3% of sponsors steal, 3% of webmasters cheat, and 3% of surfers fraudulently charge back. Of course that figure isn't a true one, I'm using it for an example before anyone asks me how I arrived at that figure.
Now let's look at how many sponsors there are... what 500? 1000? that actually do any significant volume... that makes a finite number of somewhere between 15 and 30 cheating sponsors. How many resellers are there? 20000? 50000? That would mean between 600 and 1200 cheating resellers. Not great numbers when we look at them now are they?
What do these cheaters cost this industry?
They hurt everyone in it. They drive up the costs that programs and processors incur in order to attempt to prevent their cheating. They are the equivalent of shoplifters in a department store -- EVERYONE who shops there pays the price for shrinkage.
My personal thoughts on this situation are very very simple. Finding a solution isn't rocket science, not by any means. Numbers will tell the true story and I think that every sponsor program out there should be looking at their numbers, very closely, on a case by case basis.
Good resellers should be rewarded, and bad ones should be terminated.
Every program will need to decide what their definition of a bad reseller is, there may not be a way to make a standard... but the bottom line is easy to figure out. If the chaff isn't culled from the wheat, there sure as shit won't be any bread when Visa and MC are done with us.