The whole adult internet economic system is broken.
The real question is how do you fix it? Or perhaps first, CAN it be fixed?
The business is based upon providing fantasy, and that applies to business to business as well as to the surfers unfortunately. In other words, those who play best are usually good bullshit artists. Just as you convince the surfer they are going to have an online relationship with a hottie on webcam, you convince the webmaster who sent him there that you can pay him $70 for a free sign up.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, we wont even talk about the interesting things that seem to happen to conversion rates around the time of big shows.
Why does this happen? Are people inherently thieves in the business? I'd say it's more about market position. Run a company on the up and up and dont provide insane PPS rates, and you're either going to have to generate a lot of your own traffic or stay small-ish. There are good livings to be made this way. Perhaps the real answer is greed.
Someone else gets fucked here. While trying to pay these rates, garner as much traffic as possible, and shore up margins the surfer gets dicked around. Blind cross-sells, Zango, and all of the other things we do to ring every last dollar out of that poor clod who actually pulled out his credit card to buy something from us. He gets fucked. He charges back. We lose a would be customer from the pool permanently and give Visa ammunition to make it even harder for us to process a single penny.
So what's a webmaster to do if he wants to be an affiliate and make an honest buck or two?
It's new years, I'll give a few bits of advice:
- Know your traffic. Know your surfers, where they come from and what they're looking for. Match them to sponsors which will deliver exactly that.
- Measure your traffic yourself. Know how much you send to a program dont trust their numbers, trust your own.
- Try multiple sponsors.
- Pay per click, pay per signup, prepaid, pay per impression, revshare, all of these words are irrelevent. The only number that matters is the one that is on the check. Choose your sponsors based on who pays the most for the same amount of traffic, this is why it is important you measure the amount yourself.
- Choose your businss partners wisely. If they poison your traffic, your surfer will never trust your recommendation again. They may never trust anything adult again.
- Watch your stats, know your trends. If your traffic is up and from same sources you always use, but suddenly the sponsors reported number of signups drops 50% a month after a show when his credit card bills arrive, you might wanna have a chat or drop him.
When to drop a sponsor is a very tricky question as that is ideally a business relationship question. One short check may not be that bad if the checks are much higher than other sponsors on a year to year basis. Even a late or missing check, mistakes can happen. But for me the point I dump is when trust is broken.