Originally Posted by ATKCash
ATKCash's policy on traffic skimming is as follows: We do not permit skimming to happen on thumbnails of OUR content. We have no way of controlling what or how much is skimmed off of TGP owners' OTHER thumbs, but we request that our content is not used to send traffic to anywhere but our galleries.
Our OPINION of skimming is that it's a poor business practice because to the CUSTOMER, it looks like they're being shipped elsewhere and denied the opportunity, X% of the time, to get what they asked for (the girl in the thumbnail.) As I said in my (heretofore private) email to Goodwill, it's a less-than-optimal way to gain TRUST among your surfers, whose interests should always come first.
We have had numerous complaints from customers about the way some of our affiliates skim traffic, to the tune of "I thought you guys were above that blind linking shit..." at which point we have to explain that "no, that's not us, that's one of our authorized resellers, and we apologize on their behalf." We fully expect our resellers to abide by the same business model that we do, and blindly sending Surfer Joe to some other TGP for the sake of keeping our traffic numbers high is not the way to do good, clean business.
As far as my use of the word "pathetic" to describe traffic skimming, I was referring to YOUR less-than-professional reply to my first email, which should have been taken as an effort to HELP your conversion ratio. We've found that our affiliates that don't skim traffic (our top resellers) have much higher click to join ratios, and there are plenty of them who do VERY well with our program. We've found through the years that TGP traffic tends to be jaded traffic... surfers are USED to being jerked around and are much less likely to trust ANY website because of these methods.
We'd much rather have an affiliate send us 5 joins a week that renew for 6 months than sending us 15 joins per week that cancel or charge back because they were misled by aggressive/misleading marketing tactics.
A word on our traffic counting: You, and several others, are CORRECT about our linking codes to hosted galleries. This is an error and will be corrected immediately, so in short yes, your ratio looks worse than it really is. We apologize for this.
If you think that a site that USES THE TERM LOLITA to lure in customers and thus pander to their pedophilic tastes or curiosities isn't flatly in the wrong, then you either don't know what "lolita" really means or you're the type of person who doesn't care, in which you'd be dropped from the ATKCash program for that alone. ANY of our affiliates that we find trading traffic with sites like that WILL be dropped from our program as well.
Chris - ATKCash
PS: I challenge ANYONE here to convince me that skimming traffic is an ethical, effective way to gain new customers or to build long-term relationships with satisfied customers (which is our primary goal). Just because everyone's doing something, doesn't make it right.
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