Anyone else upset by AEBN's new payout system?

I'm wondering who else out there just got dicked over by AEBN's revamped affiliate program.

I'm a long-time affiliate of AEBN's. And by long-time I mean I've been working with them since 2001. I have earned mid-six figures in affiliate payouts over the years by sending them over a million dollars worth of business during that time. As part of their affiliate program, affiliates like me were specifically promised a significant share (30%? 50%? Would have to look it up) of the lifetime purchases of any account created via our affiliate links.

That lifetime ended January 31, 2015. Or at least they broke their promise of a significant share of those lifetime accounts. On February 1st they dropped that share to a mere 3%. Basically a token offering on what has been an immensely valuable set of accounts I sent them over the years. Some of the money they're saving is being redirected at other affiliates. Some of it is being kept by AEBN.

My business is not as large as it once was, but I still send them new business and my payouts still measure about $20,000/year. Thanks to their new system my AEBN revenue just plummeted more than 75%. I estimate I'm losing over $15,000/year thanks to their new affiliate system.

I sent a letter asking them to explain the issue, to which I received a letter from a sales executive boasting about how great their new affiliate program is.

That's all. No "sorry we just dicked you over". And no "Yeah, our program really sucks for long-time affiliates like you. But hey, thanks for all the fish!"

At this point I'm assuming there's not a damn thing I can do about it. But I'm extremely pissed. Enough that I won't write back to AEBN until my mood calms down, nor will I make any decisions in this state. But I wanted to suggest that any other long-term affiliates go check how much you made in February. And to... well, I don't even know what else I'm suggesting. I'm just plain pissed off and fucked over at this point.

--Aaron Lawrence

Hi Aaron -

You know I've been a big fan of yours since 2002, even though you had that competitive/anti-competitive sales partner early on that made trying to be a fan of almost anyone be very difficult.

I'm not going to say anything plus or minus about any of my dozen sales partners here. Except to say that I've long believed there's noting "life time" about any affiliate program across the board.

I first noticed that in 2010. You made it to 2015?

I do get 30%. You got 50%??? What fine print did I miss?

Not sure which sales partner you mean. No one comes to mind in particular. Drop me a private message if you prefer not saying a name publicly.

And I think you're right it was 30%. I couldn't remember so I was just throwing numbers out there. Still, it's 3% now. That's a horrific drop in income for me and one which I am far angry about.

And what did you notice in 2010? I'm confused on that point.

As a fan and follower, I'm kind of surprised to read this. I thought when you had your son, you moved on from the gay adult biz?

My Affiliate sales have always been a roller coaster ride. In July 2011, not 2010, I noticed my Affiliate sales dropped sharply.

Stayed that way until 2013, were good through most of 2014, and now are commiserate with your experience.

At one point, I bought a package of minutes as any consumer might. $10. I immediately saw the sale in my stats. I watched some of my movies, and bought another $10. Saw it in my stats.

A couple of months later, after not spending anymore money, my consumer member started getting frequent e-mails about getting free minutes if I'd buy more.

The link to click had a hash string a mile long, but no where in that did I recognize my Affiliate tracking code.

I've yet to click on the offer, but I wonder if I did, if the "member" would no longer be mine?

Have you done any similar detective work?

I did move on from the adult business. Mostly. I have kept my websites up but have done little work on them. I did a revamp of GayGeek in 2013 but by then it was too late. Traffic had dropped off and failed to rise after my changes, and once I realized I was earning 50 cents an hour on my time I set it back down again.

I got in so early with AEBN that even after I closed down most of my main business in 2004 (this is pre-GayGeek), residual income was still quite high and came in for years. Such was the fame of the Aaron Lawrence name back then. For years I did well with AEBN after that although it gradually dropped off at about 10-15% per year. That's why I trusted AEBN. The traffic I was sending them was much lower -- it was the momentum from all the lifelong accounts that had been created via my website that were paying so well. As they gradually stopped buying on AEBN (died, took up downloading free porn, whatever) the income decreased.

Therein lay the crux of AEBN's problem. They had saturated the market so fully from early-on people like me that there wasn't a lot of reward for newer affiliates to get into the mix. They could make some money, but a lot of the traffic they sent had preciously established an account with AEBN. In which case I got the affiliate income, not the newer site that sent the user back to them.

Obviously the newer affiliates love the program revamp. The older ones like me are pissed off. I suspect I'm one of the harder hit accounts via the new system, but from AEBN's perspective they don't give a shit about me any more. If I'm not sending them a ton of new traffic, of what use am I to them?

As for your question, I think you'd have received money had you bought via that link. They don't need your affiliate ID in the url. The person's account has been flagged internally as having been created via your website. Once they login using their old account login/password they'd know to credit you with any sales that generate.

My son is 5 years old now which makes working with adult businesses highly difficult. I'm content to have moved on to other endeavors, even if I miss the "glamour" (read: sex and sleaze) of the porn industry.

I think everyone that is an Affiliate of a program, should spend a couple if bucks buying a membership in an anonymous consumer name.

What becomes of the Sponsor's interactions with the member?

I think I am finally motivated to take up the one Sponsor's offer of the free minutes. I'll click on the offer link, and see if the $10 share gets credited!

Hi Aaron -

This morning, I bought a $5.95 minutes package for my member.

I waited a few hours, in between naps, and the sale was posted!

I was prompted to do the test today, because earlier this morning, I made a sale!

So now I'm spending some time with the new Stats reporting format.

It reports "me" as being in Las Vegas! It reports the earlier sale as "France"!! Yeah, France! And that's with the Euro at a 10+ low against the USD, at $1.08. It was $1.40 when I was in Dublin in July 2011, paying $325EUR a week, for 2 weeks, at a rooming house! $1.30 just a few months ago. So the guy from France today didn't get any bonus minutes due to cx!

How did someone from France find any of my 2-dozen sites/blogs?

And both were 30% payouts.

The next test will be the offer for free minutes.

Aaron where do you see the 3% figure? I can't see that anywhere.There are no totals for existing members in the stats screen anymore and I had thousands of them.

Have not posted on here in a long time, but your thread caught our eye.

GayGeek - thank you for pointing out what possibly a lot of affiliates might actually be feeling about the new payout structure for affiliates at AEBN. What seems VERY interesting is the obvious LACK of positive comments from other affiliates about the new changes, hence, it does not seem like they made the change due to an imbalance in payouts, as they have indicated it was to correct or make fairer.

Nickbaer, you seem correct about many of your points and especially about doing testing, you have always been a steadfast source of good comments and operating practices and a great manager of affiliate related stuff. However, your comment about the "Free Minutes from a SPONSOR" (with NO affiliate code of yours in the coding) is what is MOST interesting.
The reason for the interest is this; Are you truly aware how the new system works!
As we have been informed, the new affiliate system works as follows;
1) You make 30% percent on any new member sales who sign up and purchase through YOUR theater.
2) You continue to make 30% on any new sales from that same member ONLY if they purchase using YOUR same theater (and not through another AEBN theater)
3) If that same member (you got) does purchase through a different theater you only get 3%.
Hence, if this is all correct as we have been informed, then NickBaer, we pose this to you, if you are receiving "Free Minutes" from a "Sponsor", is any link you are being sent taking you to your theater? or is it taking you to a different theater?

As we now understand things for affiliates with AEBN, if any customer you initially got for AEBN, then starts purchasing through a different theater other than YOURS, such as by using a regular AEBN theater, then you will no longer get 30% of any sale, instead you will only get 3%.

This whole thing is because of the FREE PORN, and every program out there is suffering badly. ALso about the aebn affiliate program you also make money from lets say a long term affiliate that no longer does anything and if their customer buys from you you get 30% and the long term affiliate gets nothing for that customer.

There are different ways of looking at this.

I had been adding new members every month since 2002. But the income never really increased beyond a certain level. Assuming the system was working as we thought it was, that suggests that there was little or no retention and nearly all of my longstanding members soon stopped buying or only did very occasionally. Most sales came from "fresh" members?

That means AEBN got hardly any income from those longstanding members either and mainly made money from the new members I added?

Income seemed to peak around mid 2007 and then began a steeper decline in 2011. In June 2014 (the worst month for 12 years) I earned one hundredth of what had I earned about seven years previously!

Badboysfilms, you say that others may make money from "a long term affiliate that no longer does anything." But my experience above suggests perhaps they won't.

And here's the thing... Sponsors tend to assume that we'll go on promoting them whatever, leave up pages etc. But that isn't necessarily the case.

Being in the UK I now have problems cashing Dollar cheques for less than $200 and the government is being increasing awkward about porn, particularly with an election due in May.

Recently, because the AEBN and other sponsor income had dipped so low, I decided I would switch off most of my main site to the UK completely. It wasn't worth the risk of being targeted by the government quango that has been going after UK adult sites.

I've done it simply by putting XSSI on the pages and it works with the HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY header that's added by Cloudflare.

So far I haven't turned off the pages that have the most sponsor links to my AEBN custom theatres, so they are still being found from search engines by UK web surfers. But I might decide that it isn't worth bothering to continue with AEBN at all if other webmasters are getting the benefit of the new members I add.

Years ago Badpuppy did something like this. They had a great little community of webcammers when that was the craze. They provided the hosting when that was a difficult thing and some webcammers made a lot of affiliate income on the sale of Badpuppy memberships. I had a hosted site too, though the sales never amounted to much for me. I did it for fun more than anything.

They were very nice people at Badpuppy. But one day they made changes and stopped sending the internal traffic that they had (for instance from pages listing the webcams). Some of the most popular webcammers lost most of their income and gave up. In my own case it prompted me to move my site onto my own adult hosting and that was one of the best things I ever did. I started promoting AEBN and others which wasn't allowed on the Badpuppy hosting and soon the site was making way more money than it ever had.

So the motto is: changes can cut both ways. I assume AEBN knows more about the market than I do. But could it find that those sites that tend to sell the memberships drop them and so there are fewer members around for the sites that Badboysfilms mentions to benefit from and they may not be so good at getting new joins.

The suggestion seems to be that AEBN has chosen to let more affiliates have a taste of the pie of sponsor cash, whether they add new members or not. However, as a webmaster who adds members, if your slice of the pie gets TOO small you may decide to stop baking, shut the kitchen permanently and eat elsewhere. That means there is no pie in the kitchen for anyone :tongue:

Returning to Badpuppy. No doubt they had good business reasons for doing what they did. But did they foresee all the consequences? They said at the time that they wanted webcammers to bring in more traffic from outside (so that Badpuppy would benefit). But in fact quite a few of the webcammers seemed to give up and move onto other things.