I just went to look at the front page of a gay paysite that sounded like it might be worth promoting and at the bottom of the very first page were two ads for 'competing' similar paysites that are not owned by this company. You can bet that I wouldn't be paid if the traffic I sent signed up for those...

I see this a lot. A well-known gay video store used to plaster its pages with paysite banners. Stores like that must be joking when they offer just 15% on VHS/DVD titles that only cost $9.95 and when DVDs don't sell that well for affiliates anymore. They are taking $35 for themselves for each person who signs up through those juicy paysite banners. At 15% commission I would have to sell $231 worth of DVDs to get $35.

Sometimes sites promote other sponsors that I also promote myself. Last week I was looking at a black/latino site and it has links to AEBN which gives webmasters commission 'for life' when people sign up. Am I really going to risk my visitors going off there, decide they don't want to join and then sign up for AEBN while there?

I won't even promote sites that put these on an exit pop-up, because my logs show that many of my visitors come back to my site after checking out a sponsor. So some check out four or five sponsors. I have a relatively low-volume of traffic that converts very well (1:70 to 1:300).

I just wondered what is your view on this? Are some paysite owners dumb. Or is it the webmasters who don't think about this who are the fools? Is this sometimes a deliberate scam -- set up a paysite that is average and promote better paysites on it? I mean think of all the webmasters who send traffic and never make a sale. While the site is filtering it off to better converting sponsors...