LiLi

When I worked as an affiliate only I didn't get to have first hand experience with the account holders and the information a sponsor gives us about the accounts is very limited, on CB specifically we don't know a thing about the accounts after they sign up beyond the packages they buy. Then I became a model and have a fuller vision because I now understand very well what happens after the signup and how the money flows and why. I know what users do on the site beyond what simple observation will tell me. So I want to clarify what I was referring to:

I was talking about CB affiliate whales, the accounts at the top of your spenders list. When starting or when you are a small affiliate these top spenders can make up over half your total income... in time if you have good traffic and work smart you no longer rely as much on these whales because the smaller accounts become the larger portion in proportion to the top spenders and that makes your income stable and predictable, but for some affiliates these top spender accounts are extremely valuable because their income depends on them. And when one stops spending they see a big big hit in their earnings, panic and start looking for a scapegoat to pin their sorrows to, but we will come back to this point later.

That's what I was referring to when I said "whales". To affiliate whales, the top spenders not in a camgirl's room but on your own spenders list. And those accounts sometimes belong to a model's whale, and behave like you so eloquently described, but not all the top spenders are camgirls whales. This is easy to miss when you aren't a model because from observation all you see is the attention whores. A camgirl's whale is always boisterous and extreme... you enter a CB room and you see [12902] next to a user's name and you think "damn, this man just spent someone's entire salary in one night. I wonder who the lucky affiliate is grabbing that sweet revshare" you can come to think this is the whole of the land, but no. There are users who can spend just as much as your average camgirl whale but they aren't doing it in a specific room, or for "connection". There are users who are quite addicted to the content and the shows. They spend all day on a camsite joining ticket shows, spying on privates, tipping for content, getting their own private shows, or for Lush. These spenders are much less discerning of where they spend, they can have some 20 favorite models and are very open to new experiences and different girls.

When you see a name at the top of your spenders list who is spending a bunch you don't really know what he is doing on the site. You don't know if this is a camgirl's whale infatuated with her and tipping her through his eyes for the connection... or... if it's one of those users who have too much time and disposable income and an itch to scratch. There are even top spenders dedicated to a single model or a couple of models who are also obsessed with collecting her stuff.. picture sets, show recordings, videos, they want to have every single thing she puts out. You don't get to see these other patterns because the first one, the guy who is addicted to shows, is never going to be a notorious presence in a room, he isn't tipping for the ego boost, and with the collectors, they will tip for content all the time, but again, are unlikely to become a room's king or to boast that [12901] tag next to their username so they are easy to miss.

The reason I brought all of this up though is because the affiliates who tend to be very vocal against Chaturbate models for stealing their signups don't really know why their affiliate whale stopped spending. They figure he must be a camgirl's whale, because this is the only pattern they see, and then they imagine the camgirl convincing their whale to make a new account under her affiliate and that's why they got hit with this massive loss of income. Losing half your income overnight can be very disconcerting and stressful and finding someone to blame for it helps process what happened, the problem is they don't have that information, they are going by a hunch because they don't know what happened. And while affiliate stealing is definitely a thing, don't get me wrong, and it sucks, I despise models who engage in this too because they also steal MY affiliate accounts... it isn't as widespread or as common as they believe. Chaturbate support will issue warnings to cammodels who ask "clear cookies before making an account with my link" on their bios, and if you get a warning you cannot stream until you fix the problem.

There is an issue though with these affiliates who complain of stealing, and they all tend to be small affiliates, new to this, and from Eastern Europe and it's the fact that they don't mind having huge information gaps and reaching for conclusions, they run with those as if they were a fact. And then, they don't bother to understand how the cookie system works so you see them pointing fingers and posting screenshots of models bios who are not asking anyone to clear cookies, simply posting their own affiliate link in their bios.. they accuse them of stealing, make a huge fuss over someone placing a banner on their bio, calling them names, making CB support crazy with daily emails asking for consequences for these models, when they aren't doing anything wrong and if they cared to understand how the cookies work they would know that if a model gets the users to signup without clearing cookies first, they will be credited to the original affiliate which means, even if the user creates an account with a tag, say: "C_myaccountforyou" for Clara, his affiliate % might not be going to Clara because they had a cookie in already that belonged to someone else, I don't even think models realize this as an affiliate and as a camsite it's better to have models actively pushing for singups because it does work, and to get them interested in doing that job you have to promise them a piece of the pie. Everyone benefits from models pushing the product.

And lastly... this goes to the people on this thread asking me to be more sympathetic with the affiliate's plight: I am also an affiliate. I was for years before becoming a model, and I know the success of a site depends on the work affiliates do. If a camgirl can turn on her cam and make a living it's because of the traffic the affiliates bring to the site. So I do believe it is very important for affiliates to be able to earn a living doing this and get the credit for their work and the compensation they deserve. However, there are many affiliates out there who believe this is supposed to be passive income and that lifetime revshare means they will be perceiving the earnings as long as they live. And they are very surprised to find out every single account has a shelf life, nobody can sustain that level of spending for long. Some might stop spending because a model stole them, but others get a girlfriend, or pick up a new hobby, reach their CC limit, burned through their retirement fund or their second mortgage, or piled on enough debt they don't have anything left after paying for the interest, or the model they were a whale to retires so he has no reason to spend on the site anymore... there are as many reasons as you can come up with and then there's the ones who used to spend a fuckload but found camwhores.tv and no longer need to spend a dime. That is why as an affiliate you have to continue to bring traffic to a website because spenders have a life cycle and they will never last a lifetime, and the right approach when you lose your biggest spender is to brush it off and work twice as hard, instead they spend their time obsessing over CB models bios and calling them ugly fat token whores here.

But again, I don't want to derail this thread with stuff that has little relevance to the topic at hand, I don't want this discussion to move to a different topic and let Stripchat off the hook, they need to address this and remove their ads from the affiliate's network.