You want to complain about high payouts? Well most mainstream programs only pay once a month, some once every 3 months. Sure the payout might only be only $25, but 3 months for a check?

Think that will keep anyone from jumping on the next $100 per signup promo day, or start a tread tomorrow looking for the highest paying PPS program ? :pimp

This is the biggest problem I've had with affiliate programs. It's especially common with small fetish sites for some reason.

It doesn't happen THAT often but one of my pet hates is.... programs changing ownership, and the sites magically acquiring new "marketing methods"

For example, a stale revshare program which had been around for years was sold to another well known program, who DELETED all of the FHGs, redirected all of the gallery traffic to a generic 404 page (refid was supposed to be preserved but I am still finding links that do not carry it) which pops up to 5 consoles (some with links to external, uncredited sites sites). That's 5 consoles on a formerly clean revshare site!

Does a 404 page really convert better than a FHG?

Yea, I recently had this happen with someone.
Right when I hit the $90.00 mark of my 100.00 payout the ratios went to 0:21,000 roughly...

End result is = no more traffic for them... Eventually they will realize that they cant screw over the people that are making them money.
Pretty simple concept to grasp.

Pay heed to Steve Lightspeed's rant. Think about how the age of short retention people can pay you $40 or more for a $4.95 trial without somehow cheating? Be realistic and realize it is a partnership and even paying 50% of a sale is a high marketing cost.

We are probably losing out on a mess of traffic, but the only popups (or in our case, DHTML ad) we use are to advertise our own site features. As well, it is 100% configurable by campaign_id if the Affiliate wishes to turn it on/off (without affecting how much he'll get paid!)

For example, at the moment our float-over features our Mobile service. You can clearly see it links to the join page though while keeping the affiliates' id intact

On the inside of the site, we've had very minimal-to-none upsells (the few times we did it was only for complimentary products for our members like sex toys and herbal). Our only current upsell is to IwantU Live and on that note, we will soon be offering it as a new site for affiliates to promote - so everyone would earn a generous PPS $ on it :thumbsup

We have paid all our affiliates since 1997. Sure there are mixups that happen once in awhile, but in the end everyone always gets paid (weekly at that!).

If you haven't already, give us a shot; I think you'll be glad you did.

http://affiliates.iwantu.com

Steve's post deserves a whole book of cartons from SOS ;)

its true most of what he said tho (sadly)

This is a bit unfair.

The problem is that when a program removes a site from their program, everyone comes to GFY and other boards and says "what happened" and unfairly looks for drama. Every time a site is dropped from a program affiliates love to create drama and programs want don't want bad posts about them on boards.

This isn't a dirty little trick, this is the end result of affiliates creating drama where there isn't any.

Larger programs and those using Nats / MPA3 can change those links so the traffic isn't lost. Sometimes programs can't do that and the traffic is indeed lost.

Id say the one thing that bothers me the most is having to go in every week and check every one of my ccbill sponsors in the admin area to see which one turned off rebills this week - and with over 100 of them it gets time consuming - but that list is getting smaller every week.

In response to an earlier post about NSCash - having been an affiliate ther since they opened, they have closed down at least one site that I remember - but there was emails, posts on their WM board and even an icq from their manager a good month before they did it and they even offered to help with scripts to change out the link codes to go to the girls new affiliate site with another program.

As far as not understanding the process of raws/uniques and all of the inside the paysite leaks and cross-sells - it sounds like some people need to do a little studying before they sign up as an affiliate and understand what they are getting into - its all a part of the biz and has been forever - its always been your option to either live with it or not join - heck - with most of us that have been around a while we even figure in a percentage shave on our numbers before we send traffic to a program(which it looks like a lot of people are defining shave to include things like crosssells and email collections etc now) - just like we do with all of our offline businesses.

This is an interesting read.... Good things to keep an eye out for, a bunch I have never heard of. Thanks for the post and heads up!

Unfortunately, some programs seem to believe affiliates are not capable or interested in helping to detemine how their traffic is best monetized once it leaves their site.

Personally I would prefer to partnership with a program that offered the option for lower payouts per sale by allowing affiliates to opt out of such tactics rather than with a company with higher payouts per sale funded by their focus on the latest way to secretly monetize my traffic without me receiving credit.

At the end of the day what matters most is net profit and how well you get to sleep at night. If I am given the choice between a program that did not do any of this stuff that generated 10 sales at $20 each or one that did them and generated 5 sales at $40 each, I know which one I would choose.

If the program took the time to notify their affiliates that they were going to close one of their sites before it happened, I seriously doubt any affiliate would come on the boards and create any drama. I would guess the reason most complain is because they were not told about it beforehand. Programs using NATS may be able to do that but that does not mean they do.

Click on the members area on paysite tours and sometimes you get a pretty much blank page saying that you are not authorized to login. But on others you are taken to a 404 page or another one without your ref code ...

come on you expect programs not to to watermark the pciture content they have on FHG

As he pointed out, there is a difference between a watermark containing a logo and a url.

If they want to watermark their images to prevent copyright infrignement, all they have to do is include their logo, company name,...
If they include their url as part of the watermark, they are only doing that to get typeins...

u-bob for example bangbus.com watermark would be a nono but bangbus would be ok?

That shouldn't matter anything as naturally you won't have reff codes on 404 pages.. what does matter is if your reff code is still there when you click back !
.. or more specificly, what really matters is if your reff code carries through to the join page, no matter what you click on your way to get there :)

doesn't matter...the surfers just aren't looking at the pictures..They're SAVING them to their harddrive...So even if they don't buy a membership and don't make either the sponsor or the affiliate any money. At least a watermarked photo will be on that hard drive...He may trade it or post it years later.

Or some fool could just use the same content to promote another sponsor or something...I've had people take pics of some of my black crackheads and use a whole set of pics to promote some white teen site (they're mainly russians) . There's NO WAY I'd let any of my pictures be published without the url. and I know for a fact that I'm lazy..If I could click a link and go to a site, i'd do that before I took the time to typein the domain and I type 100wpm.

Plus there's all kinds of legitimate ways that you as the affiliate could lose the sale...All the person has to do is look at your gallery at work and then go home and typein the domain and as the affiliate, you're screwed right there...

bigdog: yes, that's what i'm saying.

I really think people have way too high ideas of type in traffic from this method, when placed on a gallery why the heck would they type in http://www.paysitewithhotchickssuckingcock.com when right next to the picture there is an easy link saying "Click Here to go to the site" ?

Where the typein traffic comes from is for instance from the guy that saves the pics on his computer and then later only have the url on the pics to find the site again, or from those taking the pics and post them to boards or newsgroups (if they don't replace the watermark first anyways)

In the first case you might actually make an extra sale through the cookie tracking, in the second you would not, but wouldn't have anyways.

Another thing is that marking with Url will clearly show the surfer that this set belongs to the site and that will asure him that he will be able to find the rest of that set inside.

So that also go for the paysite tour? No mention of the URL anywhere... I mean using the logic from your argument, then the surfer may never be exposed to any urls at all, unless the sponsor is paying you per impression, and there is not much difference between the FHG and tour, both are using the sponsors design, content and hosting - just different landing pages for "your" surfers.

If it is one of those generic 403 server error pages then yeah as they will just click back since it is basically a blank page. I think the concern was that if the server is set to deliver a custom 403 error page, or any custom error page, than any/all links on it should lead back to the tour and provide proper credit.

Because they have really niche content and some kick ass tools. It will take me probably 2 months to get there, but I think the extra tools make it worth it.

The program with the 500$ minimum payout is Eurorevenue by the way. They do not advertise it, you have to go read the terms and conditions.
I like the program though, so the minimum payout is the only negative thing I can think of from them. Everything else is great.

plenty of them

from eurorevenue

What is the minimum payout?
Your account must have earned $50 or more in a given pay period for payments to be released. If you have made less than that the amount will be carried over to the next month until $50 has been reached.

so what's the deal with $500 min?

I'm not sure SoulRebel I'm just going by their TOS
http://www.eurorevenue.com/external.php?page=tos
Says there it is a 500$ minimum payout.

I want to reiterate yet again, I signed up with the program knowing it had that payout because of their niche content. I think their conversions will make up for the high minimum payout

And to reitterate, this is from the FAQ page:

"What is the minimum payout?
Your account must have earned $50 or more in a given pay period for payments to be released. If you have made less than that the amount will be carried over to the next month until $50 has been reached. "


You should email them and ask for a correct minimum payout and point them to the errors which they may have no clue about.

One typo on the TOS is 50% more likely than 2 typos on the faq page ;)

i see, more likely as tom pointed out has to be a mistake.

bump8chr

Has anyone ever ever questioned a high level of "credits" from a sponsor - where you think you've made a sale only to see it disappear in the form of a credit - some time try asking for an audit of those so-called credits and see what happens...

Ha Ha Ha This is funny people spend so much time and effort trying to find fault with sponsors because of a few bad programs out there. I found a program in 2000 which at the time was a new amateur site. The first year i made $60,000 and now in my 5th year i make almost 4 times that amount. Never had a single issue that wasn't fixed within 24 hours. Am i going to post that program on GFY ? No way its small its honest and only a few hundred affiliates promote it. Why would i want to over saturate the market.

Instead of looking for faults test out some programs with your own type of traffic and see what works for you ...:2 cents:

oh and i also love how a couple of programs snuck email collector boxes on their tours without any notification to webmasters, or offereing box-free tours, or even getting credit per email.

Well if you had lost 1000s due to one or more of the things mentioned in this thread, I doubt you would find it funny. The time and effort it takes to post about one of these things is nothing compared to the time and effort wasted promoting a sponsor that tries to secretly monetize your traffic without giving you credit.

That is great you found a program that you like. No one is asking for people to post about sponsors that don't do this stuff but rather about the things some sponsors do that lower your income.

I think bringing to light the faults of programs makes it that much easier for others to know what programs to test out their traffic with so that, like you, they can find a program they like. :2 cents:

Yes, I have. I always ask the sponsor if credits, chargebacks or refunds appear. Most don´t reply to e-mails, which seems to be a general problem with sponsor reps.
Actually I´ve got a strange stats problem with a sponsor using nats. When I click my stats, a signup doesn´t show up. When I click the uniques for that date, there is a signup for bookmarks.

So I e-mailed the sponsor:
"Hi,

I´ve got a signup showing up in the detailed stats which isn´t shown in the overview. Would you please have a look at it.
Screenshots are attached."

kind regards
Frank"

That´s his reply:

"which site and which pay period and which campaign.
Sincerely Yours,
Affiliate Support"

Obviously he didn´t take the time to have a look into the screenshots, otherwise he should have seen that exactly this was the problem, no signup at this part of the stats.

So I answered as follows:

"That´s exactly the problem. I don´t see this signup in the stats overview, too. Please click unique hits for today, there is the signup displayed for bookmarks.

I sent you the screenshots from both stats sites with my last e-mail, but you should see the signup clicking on uniques for today."

That´s it. No reply to that e-mail. I´m curious about they will take care of this problem.

This was a really good thread. :thumbsup

Members Only and Members Enter Here type links when the member login page is capable of retrieving the affiliate code is one point. Especially for those that prefer 'partnership' payouts.

Use to not be as big of a deal as surfers had to use their back button, but with new forms, etc. it is becoming a bigger issue

oops, still is:thumbsup

100 minimum payouts...a lot of money gets left on the table

I'm glad someone bumped this.. I never saw it but will read it ALL in the AM.
:thumbsup

www.southerngirlcash.com - NO SECRETS... but I will definately read this thread thorougly to make sure I'm not missing out on anything! haha j/k! ;)

I've found a ridiculous amount of 404's on tours and join pages that entice the surfer to click but don't include your affiliate code. For instance just today I was looking at a program that actively posts to this board and I noticed that they are 404ing their join page signup form. They don't show the price of membership on the join page. So if a surfer wants to see how much the site costs and tries to skip the email collection form the page 404's to the house account. Pretty sneaky and the way its set up I'm willing to bet a hell of a lot of people are being shaved big time from it.

We have no dirty secrets. Never have, never will. :2 cents:

back to the front for a minute

MIP doesnt remove site without telling you thats would be pretty fucking shitty


See Sig or CLICK HERE

see sig. weg cash rock!

Bump for Dustman... runs a tight program.. unlike his girls... ok that joke sucked :disgust

Sounds like some of you should just open up your own paysites.

Great thread, very informative :thumbsup