Or... traffic vs. content.

Let's have a discussion hehe. Now, I've been on both sides of the above. Worked primarily as an affiliate and ran a high-traffic site that made all its money from sending surfers to sponsors, as well as on the content-creation and sponsor side of things.

A lot of people view traffic as the end all, be all. That 50% revshare is, if anything, less than adequate. It should actually be more. That without the traffic the affiliate provides, the sponsor gets nothing.

Now... the above notion works if it could be safely assumed any surfers an affiliate refers would never otherwise have been aware or found their way to a sponsor site were it not for that particular affiliate, but is that actually true?

There are tons of affiliates out there promoting tons of paysites, tons of surfers finding their way around the web and all kinds of different manners in which a surfer makes their way to a site.

Who is to say that an affiliate's referred surfer wasn't just a pure-luck referral? Which is to say, it was completely random that the surfer just happened to find their way to that affiliates site, click on a banner, and end up at the sponsor as opposed to guided by some grand effort on the part of the affiliate. Maybe that surfer goes to that sponsor all the time but just lazily clicked through your referral code that time. Maybe they got lost among reciprocal links and just ended up clicking through as a sale to you almost by accident or at least by pure chance.

I know that as a producer, we put insane amounts of effort, energy, time, and money in to what we produce. We...

- recruit all the models (and deal with all of what that entails)
- film all the content, edit it, digitize it, host it, stream it, supply it
- pay massive sums of money to the models
- pay massive sums of money for hosting (much more than a traffic site would pay unless, for some strange reason, they had as much video being served off of their site as we do ours)
- deal with the legal aspects of creating adult content
- compete with tons of other producers also working very hard to do all of the above
- create a product that sells and inspires one's pulling out their credit card in the first place
- create a content and provide a service that rebills and generates recurring revenue

Is that really only worth 50% compared to the effort of an affiliate who may or may not have done anything more than just throw up a banner on their site and happened to send a surfer your way?

Mind you, there are a lot of affiliates who work their asses off to promote sponsors, promote their sponsors in unique ways and do wonders in contributing the development of their own brand as well as the brands of their sponsors. There are also many affiliates who can choose to promote a new site and, in doing so, set that sponsor on a path to success (bring publicity to an up and coming yet relatively unknown site). There are many affilites - the major, high traffic ones - that literally can set a site on fire and turn it in to a success. There are also affiliates who are up and coming and may end up being the best affiliate a sponsor ever had, though not quite there yet.

But not all affiliates are like that. So... should all be getting 50% or these huge PPS?

As a sponsor, do you look at every referred sale and think "There was no way I could have gotten that sale myself, and so eagerly pay out that 50% or huge PPS chunk"?

Shouldn't affiliates, to a certain degree, be thankful to and almost indebted to the content providers who assume the tremendous burdens of creating content?

Discuss