Quote:
Originally Posted by Dollarmansteve
wrong. Affiliate traffic is a commodity.
wrong. You are simply a vendor - for example, in many businesses payment is made via a credit card and the vendor pays 1.5 - 3.5% processing, thus "paying" to get paid.
The issue is this: 95% of affiliates are not business people - they are just worker-bees who invest sweat equity in return for a commission. Most add little to no value, and risk little to none of their own capital. They are simply brokers earning money due to the long-tail nature of internet traffic, i.e. asymmetrical information and traffic distribution.
Did I say *all* affiliates? No. did i say most? Yes. Adult affiliates are delusional.
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Actually full timers tend to be business people because there are significant costs involved. Most of us aren't running on free hosts. Many of us have our own servers and other costs. There is an investment involved and a certain return expected.
I think there is a tendency among sponsors to marginalize affiliates and when that happens I think the affiliate is simply better off sending the traffic to someone else. Many sponsors and reps think exactly as you do, yet their entire business (and brand) was mostly built by affiliates. It tends to come about in part from the desire to want to increase one's own bottom line. They look around and see affiliates as a cost rather than asset. The justification becomes "affiliates don't deserve this much anyway" and so they take something from the affiliate and rationalize it.
- One sponsor I know of once openly stated on his webmaster message board that he was basically cutting the recurring commissions for affiliates because "He had to do something to keep us motivated enough to send new sales (instead of relying on rebills)." He was not joking.
- Another sponsor I know of once posted on a certain forum topic which was number one on Google for the best term in a niche that "people shouldn't click on affiliate links, instead they should click on his link" because "let them shoot their own content and open their own sites instead. They don't deserve money." Of course the affiliates were already there long before his post. The same guy also once sent me an email telling me that I had to "let him post on forums I owned (without my refcode) if I wanted to make sales". I ignored him. This person still has an affiliate program today.
There are some real scumbag sponsors out there. The second an affiliate sees a sponsor attempt to make excuses to justify short changing (or otherwise minimizing their worth) them they would be best advised to *immediately* stop doing business with them because chances are they will screw you if they are not doing so already. Where there is smoke there is usually fire. Be warned.
