Should payout thresholds change with the economy being so down?
I understand that cutting checks or sending electronic payments takes work and organization, so it has always made sense to me that some folks would institute minimum payouts. I appreciate programs like
PimpRoll who just pay you whenever you've got money at the end of the pay period, no matter how little. And it is always easy to add a CCBill program, when you have enough traffic sites, because, even if you only send one join, you know you will get paid for it, once that one join is conglomerated with all your other promoted programs.
Only a lot of programs have been migrating to NATS and being standalone. Some of these are programs I would never have signed up to promote as freestanding programs, programs I would only ever have promoted as CCBill or Epoch. Either because the owners are unknown quantities or because I don't expect them to be major sponsors for my niche traffic.
I am told that, with NATS, the only way to get a payout, before reaching threshold, is to completely close the account. On the one hand, if I have legacy links up, I don't really want to disable them, but, if I haven't gotten a site to convert in over a year, am I really supposed to just leave my $$ sitting in an account which may never make break? Am I supposed to promote extra hard on stuff which has stopped selling, in the hopes of getting what I am already owed?
If a site is one I only ever expected to make a few sales on, should a program get to keep my money, just because they decided to rent NATS?
I understand not wanting to have to cut a zillion teeny checks every week. I actually most prefer
Kink's monthly payouts, where the amount gets to a reasonable level and I can always tell if I got paid. But I don't really think it is reasonable for someone else to hold my money for years at a time.
When economic conditions were such that one could regularly expect to hit $100 or $250 or whatever the break was in a timely fashion, that was fine. But, if it now takes two years for a program to hit that dollar amount, then
the break threshold should, in my opinion, be lower in a down economy. Especially with so many programs closing and keeping whatever affiliate payouts are in their piggy bank.