Libertine

Yes, that's right. You're the one who's responsible.*

There are way too many people out there who base their initial choice of sponsors solely on payout per signup or %. Everybody knows there are programs that shave, and with that knowledge it shouldn't be too hard to figure out that if a program pays more than seems possible, something is amiss.

It amazes me what some of you webmasters expect. Payouts that leave almost no profit margin for the program, no third party popups/links etc, hosted galleries, big parties at webmaster events, quality sites with loads of exclusive content... where the hell do you think they get the money if every signup you send them actually costs more than it makes?

A program owner once told me he basically had the choice between offering realistic payouts with no shaving, which would only bring very few webmasters to his program, and ridiculously high payouts with shaving - which would bring loads of webmasters, although the actual earnings by webmasters were pretty much the same.

Now, I'm not defending shaving. It's fraud, illegal and quite simply a very low thing to do.
But what are you expecting if you want payouts which, between processing costs, bandwidth costs, content costs, design costs, advertising costs, etc, would leave a negative profit margin for the program owner?



*<small>obviously, this only holds if you are a webmaster and are sending traffic to affiliate programs</small>

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