You raise some very good points re the comparative advantages of ready made materials vs. custom made/custom edited/hands on management.
Some thoughts
1) Webmasters who work hard on their TGPs/MGPs instead of putting everything on autopilot would, in my opinion, do better in the long term IF they divert some of that effort into closely studyingtheir traffic and user base. If they detect some sort of niche preference by their users, they should then change the composition of their offerings to meet that need. They should also investigate any subniches or layout/pic set/sponsor preferences and reorient their site to those. There's a difference between working hard and working hard and efficiently. So while's its important to work hard managing one's site. One should also work hard in finding efficiencies.
2) What do sponsors need affiliates for when they have all this ready made promo materials? Bottomline, affiliates are like traffic scouts and aggregators for sponsors. If Internet traffic was like a giant ocean of traffic, affiliates are the guys who pool water from many differing rivulets and streams and estuaries and aggregate these to sponsors who then have rivers of traffic going through their networks. By giving affiliates these ready made tools for their little streams of traffic, sponsors compete better against other sponsors who don't offer the tools. Sponsors cannot directly filter and aggregate all the small streams of traffic since this would take huge amounts of resources on their part. In essence, they are leveraging on affiliates' efforts using an efficient pay per performance model.
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Originally Posted by JFPdude
I spend most of my day networking, designing, programming, and helping others. And I keep getting asked why I do all this. The reasons people ask me this is:
Sponsors now do:
Free Hosting.
Gallery Design.
Submissions of galleries.
Free Hosted Galleries.
This has been topic of conversation of a few people and myself this week. If the sponsors are going to do all this then why do they even need affiliates?
Webmasters complain about sponsor shaving all the time but then expect all this out of their sponsors. I even heard of a sponsor designing galleries and submitting them to the affiliates tgp. I mean whats the sense?
To me this is whats causing a lot of problems in the industry. People have tgp's turned on auto pilot. Thery have no clue whats being submitted to their tgp's because the script is babysitting the tgp for them.
I know a lot of people in this industry that work hard every day. They make good money too. But they get frustrated also seeing people making money when the sponsors are footing all the bills and doing all the work for people.
I understand this is a highly competitive market. But if the sponsors are doing all the work and footing all the bills why have affiliates? Especially affiliates that call them out on the boards time after time and accuse them of cheating and shaving. Hell if I was doing all the work I would probably be shaving the hell out of my affiliates that are doing nothing also.
Discuss.
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