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Originally Posted by RocHard
In the past two -three years there has been a huge increase in "new programs". At the same time, I think the over all population on the Internet - meaning people new to the Internet - is decreasing.
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Growth in Internet takeup has all but dried up in North America, but to be strictly accurate, that is not the picture for the world as a whole. However very little growth is coming from countries acceptable to most payment processors, so from a commercial point of view the effect is the same as if little growth were taking place. The main thing many have failed to take into account for several years is that new surfers make up a very small part of the total pool, and therefore targetting them must inevitably produce diminishing returns. Successful sites in future will be those which can attract and keep experienced surfers.
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Originally Posted by RocHard
Does anyone think we are shooting ourselves in the foot by embracing newbies and encouraging them to get into the business?
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No-one is encouraging newbies into the business: zero entry cost and what we sell does that. The real question is whether sponsors should try to attract newbies to join them?
An experienced webmaster has a certain number of sales placings, whether they be promo spots on his sites/pages, galleries, PPC campaigns, or whatever. He has had a few years to collect a reliable list of sponsors and learn how to sell them. It may be worth having some spots to temporarily promote new sites, but it's not otherwise normal in this business to get better results from someone you are not used to promoting. So unless one of a webmaster's long-term sponsors has gone into decline, what incentive is there to try someone new? Which broadly means that any sponsor looking for a lot of new affiliates is pretty much stuck with trawling for newbies. The mistake of many, is how they do it.
Most programs seem to assume that newbies are idiots who can be attracted by bullsh*t and a bag of candies. Which may well be true of the majority (how else could GFY be so popular?), but then the majority will never produce any real income. Meanwhile the few experienced webmasters who want new sponsors, along with the more serious startups, are likely to turn to sponsors who come across as more professional. Even if such programs land a few webmasters who might otherwise make money, I suspect that many catch the "money for nothing" message the sponsor is putting across and end up going nowhere.