Let's meet the first contestant, shall we?
PlayWithMe, from Medly. (Cams offering)
Medly and I go
way back ... all the way back to 2001. From the very beginning they got marked as "shady" in my book because they advertised a variety of pay-per-click and pay-per-signup programs with a "retroactive convert to revshare" policy that they applied very swiftly to anybody whose pay-per-click or free/cheap signups weren't making them more money than revshare would. That didn't bother me in the specifics -- I was always a revshare guy -- but they were very deceptive about it in the early days. And my thinking about non-revshare programs is that by offering to pay for traffic before the monetization is complete, the program is making a confident wager about its long term ability to monetize your traffic. "Your traffic is going to make us so much money, we'll bribe you now with up-front money so that you'll sell us your rights to the revenue stream for less than those rights are worth." Thus, in my mind, it's cheating to make that bet, try and fail to monetize the traffic, and then come back and retroactively switch the affiliate to revshare, which is what these guys used to do. GFY used to be filled with complaints from dismayed new affiliates who wracked up hundreds of dollars in PPS revenue, only to log into their affiliate stats and see it all gone because their free signups didn't immediately convert to paid ones. So that's how they got on my shady list in the early days of the 21st century.
How about today? You have to click through three succeeding pages to find out that the "up to 35% on sales forever" that they advertise prominently actually translates to 20% unless you send more than five sales a day. Not awesome, but an industry-standard way to present the affiliate offer.
However, it's when you get to
that third page that things start falling short of my admittedly high standards.
First, I noticed that the
incorporated-by-reference main Medly TOS has a clawback for retaining funds from low-activity accounts. The amounts and timelines seem reasonable, though:
Quote:
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The Commission Payment Floor is currently $50.00... If you have not earned or accrued referral fees in at least the amount of the Commission Payment Floor in the six (6) months prior to any given monthly payment period, or if your Account is suspended as provided herein, we reserve the right, in our sole discretion without notice to you, and without waiver by us, to charge you an Account maintenance fee in an amount up to $50 per six (6) month period. The account maintenance fee charged may be deducted and offset against any unpaid Commissions.
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More troubling is the general Medly policy of allowing themselves unlimited traffic leaks. "Not all paid products or services appearing on a given FFN Site entitle you to a Commission." Back on the rules page for PlayWithMe, they make this even more explicit: "3. Orders for services or products other than a Gold or Silver level membership, or any orders following a downgrade from a Silver or Gold level membership to a standard level membership, are not compensated under this program."
No disclosure is offered to affiliates as to what other levels of membership may be offered to PlayWithMe traffic, or what "products and services" may be offered to that traffic other than gold or silver memberships. 20 percent of all sales would be a reasonable offer on small traffic. 20 percent of
a fraction of all sales, with no limits on uncompensated cross sales or upsales? No. That's not a commercially-reasonable offer. That's a pay-per-sale sort of provision, and this is not a pay-per-sale program.
That's how they getcha. Next!