How much of an ASS FUCKING are you willing to put up with from a Program Sponsor???

if someone didnt pay me i would stop traffic until i got paid

Don't waste time on none-paying sponsors mate.

20% seems pretty minimal compared to a lot of networks. affiliates are always going to get shafted in the end. Go look at some merchants on mainstream affiliate programs, they'll pay you 4% of a sale, that may not track, on a site with a dozen different traffic leaks for them to milk your lead and cut you out of the equation. I'm constantly finding myself looking at merchant shops and thinking "wow, you are really out to fuck me out of my traffic aren't you?" Opt in forms all over the place, consumer club discounts that I am exempt from, huge "order by phone" banners all over the place.


they only way you're ever going to see the maximum results of your efforts is if you're selling your own shit.

Neil,

As I pointed out to you earlier, any affiliate is free to do test signups at any time as long as they let us know afterwards. If you're looking for a company that is focused on short term gains, I'm afraid you'll have to look somewhere else.

You are using faulty data and 'facts' (an example for this would be an email in which you ask your members 'whether they've been to LiveJasmin or any cam site in the past 30 days' - this is simply not how PPS works)

A portion of your sales have been flagged and the commissions have been deducted for those sales (as it was pointed out to you in an email from our support staff). Spreading false information about our company will not change that.

For a site that pays out more than twice for PPS than any other adult sponsor, and nearly 10 times for the average, AWE gets a lot of bitching in here.

I'm getting $222 every 600 or so uniques I send to AWE. That's over 30 cents per click, which is fucking excellent for adult.

I've no idea if deliberate skimming is a routine practice amongst adult sponsors. I suspect not, because sponsors know that affiliates would simply switch to one that doesn't skim. And even if it is, I doubt if AWE does it any more than any other sponsor.

Long live AWE and their industrial payouts.

And if you dont post the proof here in this thread not sure about just a link to another you will get banned for saying they are shaving. Proof or Ban thats the rule.. If I were you I would post here what I have not ref another link.

Stay on top of your stats and ratios. Send traffic to where it gets the best return. And then no need to whine.

It would be lovely if everyone was honest on the Internet. Sadly that will never happen.

BULLSHIT!!!

#1 -- The email you're referring to was the earliest version. As the SKIMMING became more apparent, I changed the email. You haven't seen it. You have no idea how thorough and detailed the later versions of the email were.

#2 -- The 20% figure HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE "FLAGGED" SALES. These are sales that never got credited to me in the first place.


Mickey:

Will you provide me with the URL of the affiliates that got paid for the sales that were made to my Members? Without that info I have no way to know if you're truly entitled to those sales.

Then it becomes a simple matter for me to ask my Members if they have ever been to those sites. Are you afraid of what I'll find out if I ask them?

i take zero ass fucking literally or metaphorically

good that it's been settled.

congrats to both parties.

LOL

I don't want this thread to be about AWE and me.

Please share your thoughts about your experiences with skimming.

Thank you

All drama aside, and to answer the OP's question:

While there are many metrics to consider that help to optimize, in the end it all comes down to this:

Effort put in vs. money in the bank.

All affiliates should be splitting their efforts between multiple sponsors and measuring their true costs in terms of time and money vs. checks received.

I have even built my own program to promote and like many people here I have found that existing programs are better in some cases at monetizing my traffic than I am, even with the percentages they keep and the potential "shaving".

If "everyone shaves" then the playing field is level after all, if you want to be in this business you just have to take the best of the worst get what you can from it.

If you are doing a proper analysis of your EPC then it wont matter, you will still be making the most possible money for your efforts.

If you rely heavily on one sponsor, you need to keep a close eye on them and their competition and be ready to make a switch the second you feel they are taking your traffic for granted and someone else might be able to show more appreciation for it.

Shaving sucks and non payment sucks worse, if that is really going on, but even if AWE paid you for 1/4 of your total sales then their payouts would still be a little better than most other programs.

No program is ever going to pay you a dime more than they feel they "have" to. The only way to keep them on their toes is to leverage their competition.

At this point you've gotten AWE pretty dug into their defensive position and I don't see any way they would be motivated tactically to pay you at this point, it would be an admission of all the accusations you made and if I was in your position I think that in a moment of objective clarity I would know that it was a lost cause.

I think shaving was a thing of the past. Sure there may be a few programs out there that do it still but I think it is something that was much more prevalent in the past. Back when people with zero ethics were making piles of cash easily and were greedy for more.

My own personal opinion is that the companies that have been around for years have stayed in business for a reason: they are honest and looking for long term gain.

I understand a lot of webmasters out there just assume everyone shaves but that is just not the case. Most of the bigger sponsors are honest and hard working and if an affiliate knows of one that isn't then that affiliate should let others know.

In the case of the OP it sounds more like poor communication between both parties. To answer the question posed in the thread title..... None, your traffic is too valuable for you to tolerate any BS biz tactics

they are paying $222 pps, wtf do you expect?

$222 expect nothing but crying on your part wew

you never had an issue with his traffic before, all of a sudden you skim him out of 10,000$ of sales.

doesnt make sense.

how do you prove they are 'skimming' sales?

I've read your post and your site, and I don't see ANY proof that they shaved your sales.

Where is it?

It depends really. Will they lubricate first?

Sounds like chatter traffic.

I'm not willing to put up with much of anything. If I see something suspicious I'll usually bail. There are always other choices out there and if there isn't then there's always other products to sell. At times I might reluctantly put up with something minor like urls all over the hosted videos but only when it still seems advantageous to use that sponsor. Once a better choice comes along they are gone.

With your situation with AWE you know whether you were sending honest signups or not. So you know whether or not they can be trusted. *If* they really are cheats there's no sense begging cheats for your money. I mean when is the last time a bank robber voluntarily returned the money out of the goodness of their heart? You sent 100 signups over a month or so. Over a couple years then you can easily send thousands of signups. Go do it. Send it to their competitors. You're not some bum begging for money, you're sending leads. Make money without them. Fuck 'em. You don't need them.

Then why mention it in your first post

Anyways, look at the bottom line and expect everybody to be shaving you (leaks, joins, mailings etc etc). If caught shaving joins (as in not reporting sales) ofcourse I would pull all traffic.

Right. Pull all traffic on anyone shaving you in any way if you can. A cheat is a cheat. A scumbag is a scumbag. If they'll steal from you in one way chances are they'll steal from you in another way soon enough too. There are honest programs out there who would love your traffic.

QFT

On the other hand consider that affiliates can be like a bank. Say you make $100,000 profit per month but suddenly that number is down to $90,000. One way to "fix" that might be to skim 10% off your bottom 80% of affiliates. Times get tougher still and you'd be down to $70,000 if you didn't skim. So what can you do? Maybe you can up that skim/shave to 30% then. And so on and so forth until you get to the point where your affiliates finally all leave because you've been stealing too many cookies from the old cookie jar. It's a trap for dishonest sponsors really.

As far as talking believe me I'd love to but it's hard to prove without going way out and taking extreme measures to prove it. Here's one for you but no names (Don't ask. Will neither confirm or deny). I'd bet a testicle they were shaving me around 60% - 80% from the numbers. I sent them some known excellent quality hits for a few days which usually convert PPA no worse than 1:10. Now I watch stats like a hawk when I first sign up with a sponsor so keep this in mind. Can't give away too much without revealing them but these guys have two categories. They pay at the agreed rate for certain HQ traffic but under different terms for the other non-HQ traffic. Well I discovered that the non-HQ traffic (that they did not have to pay PPA on) converted about as I suspected around 1:8 but the HQ traffic from the same sources which they did have to pay per action on surprisingly converted near 1:90. On top of that click counts were low. A few days into it I think someone might have suspected that I was watching close or tracking clicks so suddenly all at once I noticed a bunch of clicks were dumped on one day into my stats (about equal to what was missing the last few days).

It told the story like a book. You'd look at the non-HQ stats and see high volume and the expected ratios but if you looked at the HQ stats (which they would have had to pay under PPA terms) it was totally off. After some days finally the non-HQ stats started to match the HQ stats (for the worse)...right around the time when all the stray hits were suddenly dumped into their stats.

What would it take to prove this? It'd take test signups all sufficiently documented, expert witnesses (to testify that it appears a shave algorithm is in place and to document that there were no known conditions to explain the test signups not registering commission, etc), and perhaps a subpoena to the people who wrote the backend so that they would have to testify under oath and also get the source code. Hardly worth it in my case. I lost maybe $40. I'll just move on. But if you're sending these clowns thousands and thousands of hits a day you MIGHT be losing a lot if they are doing the same to you. Watch out. Think this is rare, really?

..... I see no proof of shaving or skimming of any kind but it sure does sound like you were carding them.

If he was carding them that would be illegal and he's in the US. I wouldn't pay someone anything if they were caught carding.

I think any affiliate who has been some time in the business has been fucked by a sponsor one way or another, when it happened to me I lost $250, removed all of the sponsor links and moved on.

What is staggering here is the amount of money that the OP claims to have lost, yes skimming happens all the time in this business, nothing new here, but there are still some honest sponsors left that don't do that, when you have been time in the business you get to know who you can trust based on your own experience and acquaintances.

That is why I promote Playboy (in between many others), I fully trust them, their brand and their tracking system.

Avoiding skimming is just like knowing what sponsor will sell better, only experience can tell you that for sure.