I won't make less and less. I'll make more and more.
It's not a difficult concept.

I send traffic to the sites that actually pay the best for it.
If they stop paying the best, I send it to the site paying me better.
If no sponsors pay well, I either make my own sponsor site or stop promoting that niche.

The only exceptions are, I won't promote sites that treat my traffic badly and I factor in how hard it is to generate clicks each can convert.
Obviously I only promote legal sites and everything I say should be taken in that context.

All the rest are silly distractions.
Focus on who pays the best and how to get paid more
Why anyone pays less or pays more is only important if you plan to launch a competing site.

I was seriously beginning to think I was the only one that caught that.

Adding sales to provide a false sense of achievement and success is just as shady as taking sales away. I thought the practice died out a long time ago but apparently not.

more sponsors prob add sales nowadays then shave them.

On the affiliate side - something I know little about, or not as much as on the Sponser side - I can totally understand this phenomenon and have experienced it myself with regards to cams and dating upsells.

On the Program Owner side of things I often wonder if something similar (tho I wouldn't classify it as 'shaving' per se but perhaps this is all just semantics) happens with 3rd party billers. They calculate your basic volume and any growth above that is red-flagged somehow as suspicious and the scrub increases. A LARGE uptick in form hits etc might shake things up but a 'slow rise/growth' seems difficult. So I'm wondering if something like this happens with processing, too.

But I like how you pointed out this may be happening with large companies. I agree with that, since they have the resources, etc.

Please name one or post sort of proof if you can. The only ones I know were guilty of it went out of business a long time ago so I would be surprised to find ones that still do.

i dont have time to argue, but you are an IDIOT.

You obviously have a poor understanding of whining. Allow me to explain.

Ohhhhhhh assfuck affiliate program must be shaving I sent 30 clicks and there are no sales. This is whining.


Shut up you fucking cunt, you wouldn't know shaving from your first communion, it doesn't happen anywhere near the level most of the mcfryccoks on this board think, and it never happens among real business people. This is a public service announcement.

Christ people grow some hair on your ass.

Lots of sponsors pay for free signups (cpa / ppl), i.e. give money in exchange of no sales anyway.

Ohhhhhhh assfuck thread starters are whining about being shaved !!

Sorry but you are whining too.

I have had many sponsors over the years and for most my chargeback ratio is very small.

For one though it is HUGE!

Same traffic being sent to all???

I've also had that happen.

Even more noticeable an experience is when a program changes processors and suddenly conversions take a dive after years of promotion.

If that C/B ratio causes someone else to pay you more than they do per click... Send your traffic to the higher payer.
If it doesn't... Keep sending it to them.
Why they have a higher c/b doesn't matter one bit
Any time spent wondering about it is a wasteful distraction
Just move on, or don't.

That's why you live in the shit hole that you do. :thumbsup

I joined Dollar Shave Club.
I pay $3 a month for a supply of razors. Saves a fortune from going to the drugstore and overpaying just to shave.

How come this thread has so many replies? Seems simple to me. Just buy your razors cheaper. Or, if you don't have much facial hair...get an electric razor. :)

I want to try that thing. Razors are WAY too expensive. Like $16 for 3 blades of Gilette Sensors. Crazy shit.

Buy pack of 52 Gillette in Costco for 30$

saw their commercial, and liked it but never joined it, still using mach 3

The strange thing is you all wonder why programs are all moving away from the affiliates business model.

Although what you say is true it's been more of the opposite overall. Over the last five years affiliates have left adult in droves. The affiliate programs are still there it's just that the [non-tube] affiliates willing to seriously promote them aren't.

So it could be turned around.

"The strange thing is you all wonder why affiliates are all moving away from [have already left] adult"

It's not because the opportunity to promote your programs is returning great value for the affiliate. And that is the bottom line on it. People will not work for pennies per hour when something else pays dollars per hour.

Every affiliate making money still promotes sites. Either sponsors or their own sites. Affiliates who do not make money (and do not send sales) have left. They have been replaced by in-house sponsor networks and professional webmaster services-for-hire. The retirement of webmasters isn't reducing the sales of sponsor programs at all. More webmasters doesn't mean more sales in most instances.

Anyone who thinks that is unfair can easily create their own Paysites and promote them. Affiliates have all the power. We can create Paysites, tubes, do SEO work, create new businesses any time we want. All it takes is work, money or both.

Of course some will try to spin it but the bottom line is that the value proposition for the affiliate in adult is quite a bit less than it was in the past. It's pennies versus dollars. It's like the question of whether people coming out of college would like to become managers or whether they would like to work as a cashier at Walmart. Go to a mainstream forum and ask how many of them are ex-adult webmasters or why they don't work in adult with adult affiliate programs.

You will get two main answers:

1. It's all available for free. Nobody pays for porn these days!
2. All adult programs shave like crazy.

I don't entirely agree with #2 but that is the perception the industry has largely built for itself- a reputation of cheating affiliates. Again, don't ask 12clicks or oldjeff go ask the affiliates themselves. I think most of the affiliates here will tell you the same thing too. But somehow the input from actual affiliates tends to get ignored in favor of the BROtalk. And that's another reason why you can't find affiliates. Treat people like shit and they will eventually leave.

Either you didn't read my post or you failed to understand it.

The affiliate model died for most Webmasters way back when WEG, Maxcash and Quickbuck wrapped up operations. For many businesses it became more profitable to build hundreds of sites, or hire a handful of professionals to build them, than to have hundreds of webmasters build one each. Site owners can make one traffic deal with another site owner and bring in more sales than hundreds of webmasters would send in a month. That's not a sad day for being an affiliate, it's a smart day to become a site owner or professional service provider.

If a guy who used to send two sales a year quit... What do you think happened to those same two sales in the future? They still bought two sites, they just don't buy them through him anymore and he earns nothing from them. It's not like affiliates made more people buy porn or like affiliates do something site owners can't do (or hire a professional to do).

The "affiliates" who still exist are either running their own Paysites, work as paid professionals, have sites earning quietly on autopilot, are hobbyists doing it for fun, or have massive traffic. The rest have retired or changed business models. Shaving didn't cause any of that. A shift in the cost / benefit of paying affiliates or building traffic sites in house caused a lot of it.... Years ago. :2 cents:

This is nothing new. They openly have talked about this since 2007-2008 at the conferences. Basically in a nutshell, many affiliate programs said they were constantly being held hostage by greedy affiliates always threatening to pull their traffic. Demanding $100 PPS, paid in advance on joins, and alike.

In short, many at that time made a commitment to move traffic in-house and away from some of this slavery where they were overly dependent on the affiliate traffic model. The tubes came along at the right time, and made that even easier centralizing traffic and simply making it a pay to play. Now an affiliate program was no longer held ransom and could afford to stay in business.

:2 cents:

Yet many of those programs are out of business now. And for example Kink reported it's first decline in 2011, Manwin can't pay their taxes and has to layoff people like crazy, and on and on.

To sum it up:

"Adult. An Industry in constant denial."

No I read it and I understand it. It's what I call BROspeak or maybe a better term might be BROshit. It's what I've heard a lot from here over the years over and over again. It's not even worth my taking apart. The BROshit record of this industry speaks for itself and that is why people have left and it's overall revenues are declining. Of course you'll disagree and so will every bro on here but that's why it's called BROshit. :) Anyway I have better things to do. I've made my point long ago.

"McAffiliates. A Hamburglar in constant denial."

:2 cents:

I don't know why you and others think programs are moving away from the affiliate model. I belong to many affiliate programs. My inbox is full every week with affiliate promo material. With equal amounts of photo and video content. If you think TGP's are dead, where are all of these FHG's being posted? There is still a huge market out there for photos or no one would make the effort to market to them. The programs making money are the programs that are providing their affiliates with promo every week. Unless a program is good at generating its own traffic and there are many that are, they still need the affiliate or they die. So I don't see the affiliate model dying out at all. I see the successful program operators doubling down on promo to their affiliates. If they weren't getting results, they would not be doing it.

And something else. I work the amateur niche. When I see established amateur girls, and most of you know who I mean, start sending out promo by email, that tells me they need that affiliate to start promoting them. A lot have had a huge fan/member base that maybe they have taken for granted. When the membership starts to drop off, it's time to start hustling again. Who do they need? Affiliates.

As a (cam) program I noticed this: before, lots of affiliates it was from USA, Canada, West Europe, because the "money per hour of effort" it was worth comparable to (remote, from bedroom) jobs in western countries.

In the last few years, I see less and less active affiliates from US, CA, UK etc., but I see more from countries I never noted before, such as: Georgia (the ex-ussr country, not USA state), Bangladesh, Egypt. Still there's the filipino, romanians, indians, south americans around, adult that's still worth for many, there.

Note that in the past, lots of signups it was from (between) member areas & pay user newsletters, cross site advertising often not accounted to affiliates. Cam sites also had lots of signups from cam plugins inside member areas. When member areas lacked of users, this cross-sell (no original affiliate paid in most cases) also went down.

Where the westerns (and some high profile russians) who was affiliates (tgp) or pay site owners ended? In tubes and tube/forums advertising networks. Adultking blames this often, as well as Mike South's. So what the programs do today? They Shave? I think no, this was worth before, perhaps. They buy from ad networks, and on the side, they keep lots of 3rd world affiliates happy.

In the past, when you launched a new program/site, you could rely on affiliates to launch it, in just revshare. I was around pre-2003 when you just order custom shoots in russia or ukraine to build a site, launch it and thehun etc. it was full of submissions magically, ccbill handled all, and you only cared to pay the bill of fhg server.
Now instead, the fhg hosting is cheap, but you need to buy ads to make some volume (this needs media buying skills, you did not needed if using affiliates only!), and the (mostly non-western) affiliates will contribute only a little, and find you late.

About the fact that there are other ways to make more money online than adult: there was in the past too, think at gambling affiliation, or the dot-com bubble funded naive's who paid lots of dollars per install of "internet optimizer" software (I made nice cash pre-2001 with that).

Of course there may be programs still shaving, for example think at cams revshare: if you shave just very few big whales, it is 1% or less of users you shave, but that's relevant difference like 30% of sales. That's sneaky as signups number it keeps real.

I'm pretty sure you would agree you are not the 'ordinary' affiliate. :2 cents:

I've not heard a "Bro" say any of that :2 cents:

good words, fucked up scammer. fuck off, ok? :upsidedow ... go steal some more money from your surfers, you piece of fucking shit ...

Or there could be affiliate referral delay and you will never know you pulled in a whale. When that whale reaches a payment threshold, your referral link disappears and you never knew anything about it. But I'm sure that kind of thing doesn't happen in porn. We have known thieves posting on GFY all the time, but we don't mind. Live and let live, let bygones be bygones. So yeah, there is shaving going on, it's been going on, and will continue to go on. If you don't believe that, you're just naive. If there is a third party program between your sale and the credit card processor, there is the possibility of shaving. It's just not spoken about, but it is the elephant in the room, isn't it?

Not quite sure what an ordinary affiliate is. I'm certainly not a "super-affliliate" whatever that is.

The great majority of 'ordinary affiliates' sent a tiny fraction of sales, required constant hand-holding and relied almost exclusively on sponsor-supplied tools. Most did little more than make carbon copies of sites that worked (or at least what they thought were carbon copies) and then wondered why they didn't suddenly perform as well as the sites they copied.

I can't even begin to tell you how many affiliate review sites were launched that ripped ideas from mine, copied code (which was easy to detect since it was all custom coded to begin with), spintaxed original reviews published to my sites and so on... then tried to push the same programs. At one point I even had a guy who ripped my content email me to ask why his clone wasn't converting for him :1orglaugh

Affiliates are supposed to bring something to the table. An ability to generate traffic, an innovative way of pushing sales... something, anything, that the sponsors they push aren't already providing for themselves. That has gotten much harder now that so many sponsors are building their own traffic networks.

The one thing that has remained simple all along is that it is very easy to figure out exactly how much each sponsor is paying you per click. :2 cents:

It's an impotent elephant. Once you know how much each sponsor pays you per click there is zero relevance to focusing on the distraction of how they arrive that that amount.

If a sponsor claims 50/50 revshare, 30PPS, or any other payscale... it's a meaningless number. A sponsor who pays you 8 cents per click is bidding 8 cents per click for your traffic. The moment that number changes, his bid is now different. You are auctioning your traffic to the highest bidder... who cares why they bid more or bid less. :pimp

I have no problems finding affiliates, but then again my definition of affiliate is probably different than yours is, like I require affiliates to actually be able to generate sales. Not throw up a gallery page, get a shitty ratio, then bitch and moan they are being shaved or the tubes have killed the industry.

Would like to stick around a play some more, but there is an Adirondack Chair on my deck that greatly requires my ass attached to it. Stop by again tomorrow, in the meantime, I suggest Desitin for a bunch of you

I still get about the same amount or slightly more emails from program managers trying to get me to sign up to their affiliate program as I did in 2006.

I also still see lots of program owners on gfy talking about how they still value their affiliates.

Bulk email affiliate spam and GFY posts are the metrics you are relying on ?

That, and don't forget all the free drinks and blow from the BROS. :D

I value all affiliates because you never know when one will magically make a sale or begin promoting your stuff. Besides, what 'competition' is a small affiliate providing for larger affiliates who actually produce sales? Little to none.

But I agree the #1 thing affiliates (should) bring to the table is traffic. Problem is, the ways affiliates used to get traffic is drying up, consolodating, and disappearing.