|
|
This and That on a Friday
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on February 12th, 2010)
Usually when I sit down to write a column for Porn Resource I have at least some vague idea of what I want to say but not today. Today my mind seems to be blank ... it has certainly not been left intentionally blank ... it's just decided all by itself that it wants to be blank.
If you've read my other two columns this week you may have noticed that we've been having one very crazy week and I think my brain has decided that four days of insanity is more than enough. Unfortunately I've got news for my brain ... there's another day full of craziness ahead of it before it can take a break over the weekend.
Why do they do it?
When I was first involved in this industry I would occasionally come across a sponsor that carefully vetted the applications they received from webmasters who wanted to join their affiliate program. Back then I used to wonder why on earth any sponsor would want to do that ... surely the more affiliates a sponsor had the more chances they had of actually making money.
As time went on and I began to run my own affiliate program I realized that some affiliates took up huge amounts of a sponsor's time but sent no signups and very little in the way of traffic. Other webmasters merely joined my program to grab all my promo content to use to promote other sponsors.
I suppose I should have been flattered that some webmasters thought my hardcore photos were better than what they could get from other sponsors ... but I wasn't ... and it wasn't long after that started to happen that I closed my affiliate program. Steve and I found that we could get better results from our own efforts than most of our affiliates were getting and dealing with cheating affiliates was too much of a hassle.
Today I saw that several people who wanted to sign up and promote the Pimproll group of sites were wondering why they had to go through a vetting process and the guys from that program explained it fairly clearly.
Over the years they've found that many of the people who sign up to promote Pimproll sites join as affiliates with just one thought in mind ... to defraud Pimproll. They even described affiliate fraud as "rampant" and when trying to stamp out that fraud takes staff away from more productive assignments it's time to re-assess how to recruit affiliates.
That's obviously going to be a pain for the honest webmasters out there but when you look at it from the sponsor's point of view it's not hard to see why some sponsors are going to be selective when it comes to choosing affiliates.
Man there are some ghost towns out there
In one of the few times I actually took a break from doing some productive work yesterday I took a little tour of some of the webmaster boards I used to visit when I was more heavily into affiliate marketing than what I am now.
It was interesting ... and it was kind of shocking too ... there are some real ghost towns out there now. Small boards that were once humming along with dozens of posts every day and plenty of regular posters are just about dead. One of my favorites hasn't had a post since the middle of January and there's no sign of a post from a newbie since well before that.
What's happening with billing?
It seems that another billing company might be facing some difficulties and it's certainly having some hassles with billing for adult sites. I'm seeing reports of paysite owners not getting paid for signups ... rebilling not being completed but members who are out of time still having full access to the site they joined ... and not much in the way of information coming from the billing company.
There's also some suggestion that GTBill ... the company in question ... is having problems with mainstream billing as well. And that's where the root cause of this problem may be.
The credit card companies have been jumping up and down about the shady practices of some mainstream merchants who offer their product for free but then charge the earth for postage or hit the customers with high rebill prices that may not be obvious when the customer first signs up.
We may be slowly coming out of recession but we're definitely still living in interesting times and they're often made even more interesting by billing companies who aren't prepared to let their customers know what's happening.
And now I'm off to find some coffee ... maybe that will encourage my brain to continue working for one more day.
Looking for some quality text for your paysites? Sex Story Text provides quality written work for webmasters world-wide! Check out their website at http://www.sex-story-text.com.
Go Back to The Porn Resource
|
|
