After being away for the last 6 months I logged into my AFF stats to find the following. Firstly that my special payout of 65%, since 2004 was gone as of Sept. 2nd and secondly the following errors were showing in stats.
Notice the difference in percentage, or no payout at all on sales, and the low percentage anywhere between 0% and 92%.. WTF right? So I email them.
The following is the gibberish I received as reply to my emails....
Intial email attached is the image of stats above...
"Hey Andrea
Long time no talk! I am back from my trip, it was a long time to be away but I had a blast!
Anyways I was looking at stats this morning and something is definitely screwed up.... I am supposed to get 65% of all sales and renewal but I am seeing some I didn't get credit for at all and some that are as low as 20ish%. Attached is a screen shot I took today, Sunday Sept 19th, it looks like the problem started around the first of Sept. Which would also explain why I had a $300 drop in the Sept 15th payout. Could you look into this for me?
Quick math tells me I have earned approx 376.09 for the month of September, but the previous pay out and todays balance reflect no where near that."
to which the response was she will get it looked at...
So today this is the response I received....
"Hi Melissa,
Starting at the first of this month our President has put a safety valve on all affiliate accounts that had a special payout. It seems as though we have continued to payout out special cuts to some affiliates who have slowed their promotions down.
The purpose to us rewarding affiliates with higher than normal cuts is because we wanted to thank them for their high volume of traffic (like when you were sending us 200+ members in a month).
We will still honor the special payout, but now with a safety valve, we require that the account must generate 5 or more new paid orders in a day, and then the special payout
Best Regards,
Andrea *****
Sr. Affiliate Marketing Manager
FriendFinder Networks"
The important parts here, there is no mention of this "safety valve" in their TOS.
Secondly, in all my time with AFF i only sent more than 200 new signups in two months well after this special payout was put into place in 2004, at no time in 2004 did I send over 200 signups. As you can see here.
This special payout was put in place in 2004 after I brought another affiliate related matter concerning payouts to their attention. The verbal agreement was I got 65% and kept my mouth shut as it would have been quite damaging at the time.
So throughout the day today I have been emailing back and forth with my Affiliate rep and getting no where, she's great but basically all I kept getting was gibberish forwarded from programmers that made basically no sense at all.
to which I finally posed one last question, So are you saying that the $36.98 I see in money owed to me and the $114.?? from the first half of the month is correct?
To which the response was yes. end of story, beginning of fight.
No where you have to send a certain amount of traffic to keep your rebill, and infact though I am not sending much I am sending new members so I guess I am missing the point.. Other than i worked my ass off to get those customers to begin with and now AFF is trying to get out of paying for them...
So be warned if you have a special payout arrangement with AFF, eventually you may not even get what a regular affiliate would!!