SUMMER SLOWDOWN: What Can We Expect?
 

It's coming, can you feel it? Can you feel the heat?

No, I'm not talking about the NBA Finals, I mean.......SUMMERTIME! Time to take a break, go on vacation, catch a game, go to the beach, attend a bar-b-que, watch that 3-D movie blockbuster everyone's talking about, hangout with friends, travel, holiday, vacation!!!!

But for God's sake don't buy any fucking PORN. Oh no, that would be WRONG.

So summer is coming (June 21) this week, meaning the infamous "summer slowdown" is almost upon us. So what can we expect? Lower sales, sure, but by how much? Do you experience this mysterious phenomenon? Because I honestly don't....

In fact, August tends to be my best month of the year. Hmmm.....well, get ready, get your sun tan lotion out and your 3-month supply of Chill Pills ready. It's SUMMERTIME!

Work harder.

I've never experienced this on either site so I often wondered if this was something shady sponsors made up as an excuse to shave affiliates. Summer months have always been some of my highest sales.

I've seen fluctuations throughout the month that can probably be attributed to bills coming due but never seasonal fluctuations like you hear people talking about all the time.

never had one either but I've only been doing this 10 years so you never know

Wow!
I felt it. My skin is already melting.
Can't wait to hit the beach and see all the beautiful ladies there!

I live in Texas. It was already too fucking hot a month ago.

As for business? I'm ramping up my sites so I don't think I'll be able to attribute slow traffic to anything in particular yet!

What he said, basically...

I think its kinda a myth...

summer slowdown is a myth perpetuated by middlemen

It's not as bad as it used to be. Computers are more integrated with our daily lives (mobile etc).

PS: We don't shave sales. We add sales to motivate our active affiliates.

Summer starts June 21? Da fuck is wrong with you?

15 years and never noticed a thing

We have never experienced a summer slowdown. The only seasonality I have noticed after 11 years is a nice bump around September which I have always attributed to newly minted 18 year olds and credit cards back at school and a slump around U.S. tax time. :thumbsup

This industry seems to make up an excuse for every holiday, week, month, time of year, etc why sales are down. Kids back in school, kids out of school, new computers for christmas, credit cards maxed, holiday spending... IMO it shows how out of touch with their customers people are.

UNofficially summer is between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

OFFICIALLY summer is June 21-Sept.21.

But what the fuck do I know? I can only read calendars.

Exactly my point. I'm not saying this was made up by sponsors so they can prepare affiliates for shaving because I don't know for sure but I've never experienced this since we opened in 2005 and many of my friends who own sites have never experienced this either. It just seems kind of fishy.

do you tell your active affiliates that you added a sale?

It is winter here....

12 years in the business now and every year people say the same thing but I've never seen a constant slow down every summer. There have been summers that had lower sales but many that had average and great sales. I think it all evens out in the end.

People tend to drink more in the summer. Then wifey/gf is still up when he passes out so no time to play on computer porn.
I believe the bbq is the cause of slow sales in summer for sure.

I definitely masturbate slower in summer.

here too, getting very cold now

Hey you stole my line!

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I am sure he is probably kidding but that struck me as a bit odd as well. It sounds great on the surface but dig into it and it is essentially the same as shaving ethically speaking since it means you are hiding non-sales rather than sales, but the fact is that would still be obfuscation and manipulation of actual sales data which is what most people define as shaving.

Not sure he was joking, and yeah - any kind of transaction manipulation on programs' part is not cool, even if it makes you a couple extra $$ now & then.

I know you'll probably never agree with me but many of the people who have said it in the past were using it as a shave excuse. I remember an AVS who started with it suddenly in the early days. They would go on their message board and talk about the great "summer slowdown" every year and sure enough sales would fall at least 30%. Right around the same time they went from the full join form to the two-stage email collector style form as well (good for the site collecting email leads, generally bad for affiliates). The owner was shady but back then you made wheelbarrows of money with low effort so it wasn't as big of a deal.

Those of us that have been around long enough to remember the true golden age of affiliates know that "reverse shaving" was popular back in the day... but that certainly didn't make it right.

I hope he is kidding. If not, then I think that concussion might have been more severe than any of us previously imagined. It would be like one of those movies where someone who lies all the time gets bumped on the head and suddenly can't help but tell the truth.

Trippy.

This is a question that only Paul Markham can answer.

It's better if the sponsor lets the affiliate know but I don't see any problem with so-called "reverse shaving". Think of all sales affiliates lose to tracking issues and watermarks on the content they promote. More than likely even with the extra added sales it does not make up for it.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Disagree. What criterion would make that ok? How would the program decide which affiliate got "gifted" some sales for the issues you describe? How would you feel if you weren't one of the "chosen" that gets some sales?

First off, the branding thing you mention, that also works to the affiliates advantage as well, and if the affiliate disagrees that it does then there are programs that allow unbranded content to market with.

Second, the "lost sales" of bad connections etc. is an issue that is shared by the program and the affiliate. In fact, the program usually comes out on the worse side of that problem.

Seems like you are basically thinking it is alright so long as it benefits you without considering the downside.

It's not to my advantage as an affiliate at all if your url is on the content and the visitor types in the url without clicking my affiliate link. That means I won't get any credit for the sale. But as the sponsor you still get revenue from that visitor which I really sent. The advantage is to you only. If the visitor does that it means you get my share too.

I'm not talking about "bad connections". I'm talking about bad affiliate sales tracking and cases where visitors delete cookies for privacy reasons and things like that. This number only increases every year. It has never decreased. As a sponsor you still get revenue from those visitors as long as your biller approves them. As an affiliate I usually get nothing. The situation is made worse by ad blocking. It means my affiliate banner could get blocked while only the content is shown conveniently with your url or brand name in big letters for the surfer to google. Sure if I am smart I would use regular links and such which do not get ad blocked to counter that but it's still something which can only work against me. Up to 30% of porn surfers are using some type of ad block.

I don't care if the sponsor credits random affiliates for type in sales. As long as they aren't taking them from me or other webmasters. In fact I remember one sponsor who used to claim years ago (when affiliates were the main means of promotion) that he would credit every sale which was not tied to an affiliate to a random affiliate. Why would that bother me? What would piss me off is shaving me so that you can pay more to others (such as the "bros" who own the big tubes).

Unless you just misunderstood me or I conveyed myself poorly you really don't seem to understand how affiliates think. Either that or you are being purposely naive or something. I don't know. I guess you aren't primarily an affiliate so it's no wonder you see it from a sponsor perspective.

so if you started a test to a program, and got a ratio of 1:50 for the first day, and every other day would be no joins at all

and then you found out you got a 'motivational sale', and there was no actual join at all

you'd be totally ok with that?

You clearly don't get it and even worse now you are just going to try and insult me rather than have an intelligent discussion.

A strong brand it can be debated helps you make sales more than it helps you lose them, but if you don't feel that way, then you have a choice not to promote branded clips from the respective program.

Deleted cookies I agree are an issue but it is well known that cookies are on the way out

What magical pot of cash enables a company to not have to take income from one place in order to pay in another?

Perhaps with your affiliate savvy and genius you can explain that one smarty pants.

Mind = Blown :1orglaugh

It's not an insult. You're a sponsor primarily and not an affiliate. You're basically spouting sponsor propaganda.

1. Urls on affiliate content is good for affiliates
2. Reverse shaving (crediting affiliates for sales they didn't get) is wrong.
3. Sponsors have to do the bad stuff (from an affiliate perspective) and take x% of sales they should receive otherwise it wouldn't be viable.

You don't seem to understand the affiliate perspective or you choose not to. Now you're clearly being the one who is insulting because I dare to disagree with you about affiliates when I'm primarily an affiliate and you are not. I'm telling you as it is. No affiliate likes urls on promo content. None. It doesn't help US. Some of us only TOLERATE it. And you don't HAVE to do that. Sponsors went for years without doing it.

An affiliate should absolutely credited for ALL revenue they send to your sites. That is the ideal. Saying "oh if I didn't get 20% of your traffic for free using the urls on the videos then I would not be able to pay you 50% revshare" is no excuse. It's bullshit. The affiliate sends the sales, pay them. No excuses. No bullshit. No tricks. No games. No whining.

What are you talking about?

Even if you want to claim I am just a program owner and not an affiliate, which is not the case at all since we promote programs extensively, you still are assuming a lot to say I don't understand the affiliate perspective. Even program owners still better be very aware of what it is like from the affiliate perspective or else they really shouldn't be using affiliates to market with.

We aren't talking about affiliates getting payed what is earned and deserved. We are talking about sponsors faking sales to affiliates to get them to promote more. I didn't disagree about "being an affiliate" at all. I questioned how you could call it ethical if a program falsely adds sales, for the same reasons you would call it unethical if they withheld legit sales.

Perhaps you lack the business acumen or the ethical integrity to grasp where I am coming from. If a program is "adding sales" to make your ratios look better then they are deceiving you plain and simple. You are trying to say "oh, but the affiliate should get it because deleted cookies", or whatever, but that doesn't take into account how and why a sponsor would do that.

You just basically are ok with it if it works to your benefit. Basically you just tipped your hand. You don't mind if the dealer passes you the ace up his sleeve as long as you get a cut of the pot.

So you can back peddle and try to belittle me all you want but now we know what's up with how you like business to be conducted.

Interesting how this thread turned into shaving. LOL Being a Program Owner and basically not interacting much with other Program Owners (except via ICQ, GFY, etc) it does surprise when people say there's a "summer slowdown" but, as I said, I am fairly isolated here in NYC. :)

I started this thread because, after looking at my own numbers for the past 4 summers (how long I've been in business), I don't see sales slumps in the summertime BUT - and this is a BIG BUTT, hehe - BUT I also add new websites in the summertime, thereby increasing my revenue and the rising tide lifts all boats so, again, I have a limited/distorted perspective here.

As far as 'reverse shaving' that is a wild, wild thing! "Let's give legit sales from Affiliate A - or from type-ins - to Affiliate B because once Affiliate B sees more "magic joins" he will (theoretically) promote your Program more. Wild.

I'm assuming here for this kind of snarky "reverse shaving" to occur a Sponser (and Affiliate B in this example) would need to be sending enough volume to make this kind of shady thing worthwhile. Crazy shit. I'm not even sure there are enough programs still out there with enough volume and enough Whale Affiliates to do this. But who knows, affiliates would know better than I.

Is it wrong? Yes.

If a sponsor wants to prove their value to affiliates, I mean besides the obvious of making real conversions, then they don't need to seed fake sales to make ratios look better. They can simply pre-pay the join and allow the ratios to speak for themselves. :2 cents:

I'm not going to take over Mr. Peabody's thread so this is it from me. But in a nutshell very few affiliates are going to be upset about about a sponsor seeing they have a 1:5000 ratio and deciding to credit them a sale or two as a sort of "comp". It's mainly an issue if it goes the other way where they shave.

Likewise no affiliate likes urls on sponsor content. It's branding for you, not us. We need the surfer to click the link in order to get credit unless we cookie stuff the affiliate code. Making it easier for the surfer to just type in the url hurts us. This is pretty much common sense here.

If you disagree we can always start a public (so we can check to see who is really primarily an affiliate) poll thread like "Affiliates: Do you prefer sponsors putting urls on affiliate promo content" or "Affiliates: do you have a problem with a sponsor giving you free money and sales with no catch?" and see what the results are. I think most affiliates know what the results will be already if it's a fairly worded poll.

I think the assumption here - and I have no idea, just speculating really - is that some programs will assign "unclaimed" sales to affiliates. So no affiliate is getting their sales actually taken away (from A to B as you say), these are transactions from type-in traffic or the program's own promotions - essentially the program itself takes a small hit to encourage those selected affiliates. Still misleading & still wrong IMO.

Yep, it was way more popular way back when, and even then I realized it was a short sighted recipe for disaster... besides just being plain wrong :Oh crap

Yes. I don't see it as misleading and wrong unless they later shave the other way too. I see it like a comp. It would be better if they just said "Hey man, I see you've been sending good traffic and have been having some bad luck. Here's two sales to bring your ratio today to 1:3000 at least. Good luck and keep with it." but whatever.

The more common accusation historically though is that often a sponsor will not shave at all at first and then after a certain amount of time where the links are up they will start shaving. Some have used the "reverse shaving" as a possible reason for the occurrence instead of regular shaving. They say the sponsor gave you free sales at first to encourage you and then stopped after a while. This is in contrast to saying "the sponsor kept the shave low at first (the honeymoon) and then cranked it up".

Well you have already mis-framed it again already. It is one thing if a sponsor openly advertises "hey there affiliate, if you send (X) number of hits and don't make a sale then we will credit you one for trying no matter who you are". That is very different from "Hey, we need this affiliate to send more traffic so let's make him think the ratios are through the roof so maybe we get more juicy traffic".

If you can't understand the difference of that then no poll of public opinion is going to help give you the level of intelligence one needs to grasp that level of the obvious. However, I think you are just trying to reshape the entire point just because you know at some point you realized that you actually have no point. The question was originally raised because not only myself but others questioned what XXXJay meant because it definitely sounded like a reverse shave scenario, that's all.

If you are not sponsor then maybe you don't get the sponsor perspective that you have to take a sale from someone else that actually deserved it to give it to someone that does not. That is why it is just the other side of what you call shaving but it is still shaving, albeit in reverse...

It's really bizarre how you accuse me of insulting you but in every post you get these little digs in.

Here was my very first post to you about it in the topic:

Do you see the portion in bold? The very first sentence? What exactly did you think I meant by that?

Even then personally a sponsor can send me all the free sales they want for as long as they want. Just don't do it the other way around. :upsidedow It's not greed, it's business. I'm not saying I demand it.

Sorry Mr. Peabody! This is it man. I promise. :)

I saw that, just didn't think it was more important than the other aspects of what you were laying down because it is sort of a lame apology for it - like "well, they should be upfront, but if they are not then that is ok as long as it benefits me" is how it came off to me. Then you began questioning my intelligence and experience and completely opened the door to me doing the same back.

Go to my post if you want to play "Post the Quote". I politely disagreed with your perspective and gave a valid reason why. You didn't have to turn it into "you are unable to understand what being an affiliate is all about.", but you did.

Now deal with the consequences.

The person you should be apologizing to is me. :2 cents:

The "free sales" you are talking about are worse than Markhams "magic joins". You are simply oblivious to the fact that Peter must be robbed to pay Paul in that scenario. You have been around how long not to realize that?

I think I started that ball rolling. I've been hearing about seasonal slow-downs for years but couldn't figure out what everyone was talking about so it was just an assumption that it might have been something shady program owners started to explain "seasonal shaving".

Are most of the "seasonal slow-down" threads started by sponsors or affiliates? I'm sure there are sales patterns in any industry for various reasons and if the info is coming from sponsors then there might be something to it but if most of the info is coming from affiliates then that seems odd.

The Summer slowdown as far as I am concerned has nothing to do with sponsors or affiliates.

In brick and mortar adult biz days, Summer typically did slow down because buyers and producers went on vacations. In many cases the two sides would work in tandem; i.e., the buyer would declare "we are not going to be here for two weeks in July" so don't do any street dates for products during those days. So the producer would work to get stuff in before or right after then go on their own break.

Online doesn't have as radical a seasonal shift because when you get right down to it a surfer doesn't convert necessarily differently in Summer than in Winter, so if the traffic is there so should be the conversions. So what Peabody originally said holds true for us as well. If we work hard to increase traffic and improve conversions then the time of year is less important than the amount of effort we put in no matter what season it is.

No worries, you bring up a LOT of excellent points. And I agree, the litte digs should stop because you both have intelligent things to say and contribute, albeit from slightly differant perspectives. Of course, GFY can make anyone a little prickly. LOL


Actually I think DWB may have it right. Not saying some Sponsers who do this don't take sales from Affiliate A and give them, magically, to Affiliate B. But I could see how type-ins re-directed to "preferred" Affiliates is more than possible.

In Scenario 1 (let's call it) Sponser takes legitimate sale/rebill from Affiliate A and gives it to Affiliate B ("re-assigns" it). This would be BAD.

In Scenario 2 a Sponser assigns type-ins, or "uncredited sales", to Affiliate B. This would be GOOD (for Affiliate B; the Sponser may not think it's "good" short-term but is banking on future love from that all-important Affiliate B).

Again, I think this depends GREATLY on volume (or future volume, as it were) from Affiliate B. Otherwise why go through all that effort and shuffling sales/rebills around?

I STILL think that if a Program Owner/Sponser put that kind of effort into making his sites stickier, conversion ratios better and increasing Member retention he'd be better off long-term rather than trying to think of ever-cleverer ways to shave hard-working affiliates (who are getting squeezed enough as it is).

Looks like ccbill put as much effort into their blog as they do into programming their admin UI.

I think the saying goes... if you feed an affiliate a free sale you feed him a few beers, but if you teach an affiliate how to convert his traffic then you have taught him to be a whale.