Originally Posted by BigFurry

This is not true, affiliate joins/rebills have a very long tail. In a bigger program, after a few big affiliates sending a lot of sales, you have hundreds of affiliates who send 1-2 sales per month. And then thousands who do even less.

But they do want these affiliates, because when you add these small affiliates together they represent a large volume. And sales aren't the only thing that matter. Affiliates sending traffic at 1:10000 ratios are useful too, because they're providing huge publicity for almost free. (Bandwidth is super cheap.)

It's also impossible to tell who is or who will be a big affiliate. An affiliate sending 1 join per month to you might be sending 100 per month to another program. If you don't accept them or treat them badly, you'll never know what kind of business they could bring to you.

This is the power of self-serve affiliate platforms. You can have 30 or 2000 affiliates promoting you, and it's almost the same expense for the company. The biggest programs in adult are still open to affiliates of all sizes.

(I'm talking about traditional paysites and camsites mainly, certainly there are private CPA network with different business models.)