Affiliate Programs That Make You Wait To Be 'Approved'

Seriously, whats the fucking point?

If im joining a program its because i want to start sending you traffic right away, why cant these programs put a small warning on their signup forms that the new affiliate account im signing up for isnt going to be active until one of their affiliate reps see's the email, decides if they want another affiliate in their program and actually 'accepts' my application.

Its stupid, i understand why some programs do this but really, if you are a relatively new program doing this, you are losing out on traffic.

I signed up for 3 new programs in the last 5 weeks alone that have done this and after finding out i had to be 'approved' to send them my traffic went elsewhere.

There are plenty of other places for me to send my traffic, if you, as a program owner cant have the courtesy to allow me to start sending traffic immediately, then im not working with you, period.

I cant afford to waste time 'waiting' for an affiliate rep to 'approve' my application to join your program which i dont even know im going to be paid by for the traffic i do send.

Not having an instant signup to an affiliate program just makes it much easier for me to send my traffic elsewhere and im more than happy to do that.

Regards,

Lee

I agree 100%, I hate this too. When looking for new FHG's and signing up for sponsors I oftentimes just forget about it after some days and sometimes I have to wait up to 3 days for approval. It's quite unclever to not autoapprove new webmasters and ban them later if they violate any rules...

with us www.cupidocam.com you can sign up and start sending traffic immediatelly ... but the welcome message will triggered manually .... after you have been checked ...if that makes you happy ... feel free to sign up ;-)

"Seriously, whats the fucking point?"

The "fucking point" is that if one of our banners or images shows up on a trash site (stolen content, questionable age content) NOBODY will say, "Why that affiliate is really behaving badly" but rather "WHY THE FUCK WOULD MANIFEST ENDORSE THE THEFT OF MY CONTENT!!!!" If an affiliate that has been banned for violations in the past, WHY should they be allowed to sign right up again to send more chargebacks?

If an affiliate does not understand how our site should be sold, then I do not want them. Early on, I had an affiliate that sent traffic that was converting like crazy. They made sales at a rate never before seen by our company. These were not fraudulent cards, these were customers that were PISSED OFF that we did not have bareback or fisting or watersports inside our members area. The affiliate had created a preview of their own using our images that linked directly to our join page. 97% of those customers had to be refunded to avoid chargebacks.

Not screening your affiliates is foolish. Just as foolish as those personals ads that list a home address saying "I'm face down, ass up. Come breed my cum filled ass. Leave the lights off and just fuck don't speak" When this guy gets clubbed in the head, who would be surprised?

If an affiliate can not wait a maximum of 12 hours, then they are pretty clearly not going to have the patience to see if their strategy or program is even going to work.

I can understand both sides and as an affiliate I'm prepare to wait a reasonable time for approval. However, if a company says that I have to put up their stuff before getting approval I certainly won't do so. Check out my site as much as you like, let me know that I'm okay to promote you and your banners and things will be there. But I'm not sending traffic in advance.

i think most of the times affiliates should start promoting right away .... if somebody wants to harm you you cant to anything against that anyway ... he would just use another identity ...

we have never had bad experiences ... and usually its enough to close the nigerian or vietnamese accounts when you find them ;-)

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Originally Posted by attis

But I'm not sending traffic in advance.

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I can't imagine a reasonable person would ask an affiliate to send traffic in advance of an approval. We just want to know where and how our site would be promoted.

Affiliates are the first exposure to new surfers that will be visiting the sponsor site. If they do not make the right impression, then why bother having them? Unless you are running a niche site, you have no idea how screwed up some affiliates can be with regard to the way the present the material. Our site makes a LOT of our revenue from rebills. If the site is not sold properly, then members do not stick because their expectations were not met. In the worst cases, they chargeback. Since we don't let chargebacks just slide by and because we investigate each one of them, this costs us time which is certainly money.

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Originally Posted by Alex_Manifest_M

Not screening your affiliates is foolish.

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I agree, but i screen EVERY single affiliate that joins Condom Cash and i allow the affiliate to start promoting my sites immediately after they signup to the program.

Saying you make an affiliate wait before approving them because you want to 'screen' them just doesnt cut it because i know they can be screened and still approved instantly because thats what i do.

Regards,

Lee

Hi,

how do you screen or check your affiliates.... how would y'all screen me who does not quite show up on the US market and leaves a quite light footprint on the internet in general?

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Originally Posted by Lee

I agree, but i screen EVERY single affiliate that joins Condom Cash and i allow the affiliate to start promoting my sites immediately after they signup to the program.

Saying you make an affiliate wait before approving them because you want to 'screen' them just doesnt cut it because i know they can be screened and still approved instantly because thats what i do.

Regards,

Lee

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Good to know that we just "don't cut it".

So grab some traffic, cut the affiliate loose and never pay them a dime. Sweet deal for you it seems.

The way you do things is not the only way. Clearly.

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Originally Posted by Alex_Manifest_M

Good to know that we just "don't cut it".

So grab some traffic, cut the affiliate loose and never pay them a dime. Sweet deal for you it seems.

The way you do things is not the only way. Clearly.

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Alex,

Dont get all defensive, im not talking about you specifically, im saying that for any program to say they make an affiliate wait because they want to screen the affiliate is crazy.

In todays marketplace with the technology available to us in the industry, there is absolutely no way an affiliate should have to wait to be manually approved.

Plus, if you are saying you are only not approving affiliates that have been banned from your program before or are misleading the surfer by lying about what is inside your members area, they shouldnt be suprised if they get booted out of the program again.

Regards,

Lee

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Originally Posted by DEVELISH

Hi,

how do you screen or check your affiliates.... how would y'all screen me who does not quite show up on the US market and leaves a quite light footprint on the internet in general?

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There are some really basic methods any program owner can use to check the validity of an affiliate, the first is to make sure that the new affiliate signing up to any program has an active website and that the site is hosted somewhere that isnt 'yahoo' or 'geocities'.

Then there are name searches based on exisiting affiliates, you would be suprised how many affiliates join the same program over and over again.

Then there are those who simply dont read the T.O.S if someone signs up from say, Iraq, and they havent emailed me first, their account gets removed, it clearly states in the T.O.S where the 'banned' countries are and if they reside in that country to contact me before joining.

There are also IP checks that can be done and of course if you run a CCBill program, you can always send a flag over to CCBill's fraud dept and ask them to check an affiliate out for you also - This is actually how i catch most of the scammers that join Condom Cash, something just wont sit right with me and ill ask CCBill to work their magic.

Regards,

Lee

I agree with Lee and think that sponsors should auto-approve new affiliates.

But I don't think it's unreasonable for a sponsor to include a clause in their TOS that says they can terminate the account at any time (actually, I think most sponsors already include this, right?). Then the sponsor can check out the affiliate at their leisure and if they see a problem, pull the plug. This is the "innocent until proven guilty" approach that I think most people agree is fair. The sponsors that require pre-approval are taking the "you're guilty until I find out otherwise" approach and I could see why it would frustrate honest affiliates.

So after they have put up our banners and video previews on their sites filled with stolen content, then I should not expect to get the same "Why the hell would Manifest use the theft of our videos to make money for them" vilifying our sites in the same way I have seen others done.

If an affiliate can not wait 12 hours max then they do not have what it takes make sales.

We do not work on the premise of shutting the barn door AFTER the horse has run off. It is much harder to have this material removed then it is to simply not get it out there to begin with. But if a site owner has zero interest in the quality of the promotion, or the dilution of the value of the content they provide to their blog clients then I imagine putting it all out on the curb for anybody to grab is just fine.

Everybody's friend is everybody's fool.

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Originally Posted by Alex_Manifest_M

If an affiliate can not wait 12 hours max then they do not have what it takes make sales.

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Really?

Did you ever think it was because we have bettter things to do with our time than 'wait' to be approved to start sending traffic to a home?

Im sorry but with so many sponsors in the industry im not waiting to be 'approved' by anyone im just going to move on to another program.

Im the first to admit i have no patience, i hate waiting in line at the store, i hate having to wait to download content, theres no way in hell im waiting for some self-absorbed affiliate program owner, who doesnt think their shit stinks, to tell me when i can start sending traffic to their sites $0.02

Regards,

Lee

I agree with the folks at manifest. IMHO, if you cannot wait for 12 hours to start promoting then you don't have the patience IMHO to push a program appropriately. It is a business and should be thought of as such. If you are so impatient that you cannot wait for a few hours to get approved then I'm not sure you have the patience to work the program the way it should be.

I also agree that it is a double edged sword. If you auto approve and let them send traffic then you get the whole "Why the fuck was I canned" emails. On the other hand you get the "Why the fuck am I not auto-approved" emails. The simple fact is that validating an affiliate account is necessary. Some companies just do it differently, I would rather check them out first, then afterward.

Again my opinion only, it just means planning ahead and working the product to the best of your ability.

OK my turn. As of about 2 months ago we started screening affiliates and doing a pre-signup procedure before accepting them and allowing them to join HunkMoney. Since doing this, we have seen a ~90% decrease in fraud.

If a new affiliate is worth his salt, he will realise that our program kicks ass and our sites convert, and giving us a day to approve him is not a big deal at all. And once an affiliate is approved, we provide them with personalised support and service to make sure they get what they need to make more money with us.

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Originally Posted by Lee

I agree, but i screen EVERY single affiliate that joins Condom Cash and i allow the affiliate to start promoting my sites immediately after they signup to the program.

Saying you make an affiliate wait before approving them because you want to 'screen' them just doesnt cut it because i know they can be screened and still approved instantly because thats what i do.

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We used to do this, and it worked when we had a very small number of new affiliates signing up daily. However, HunkMoney has really taken off as an affiliate program of choice, and that has attracted a lot of attention from good and bad affiliates alike. We moved to a screening method after waking up several mornings in a row to find yet another scammer affiliate who joined HunkMoney and sent through 5 fraudulent sales within the last 8 hours. Sure, we managed to credit some of those sales on time, but some resulted in a chargeback as well (costing us double dollars since if you credit and get a cb you cannot reverse that original credit plus you have to pay a cb fee, also this really fucks up our cb and refund ratios).

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Originally Posted by DEVELISH

how do you screen or check your affiliates.... how would y'all screen me who does not quite show up on the US market and leaves a quite light footprint on the internet in general?

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Too easy, I know you and trust you. Thanks to my history & involvement in different communities, I know a lot of people who know a lot of people. If I don't know them, I run through a full screening process which I will not share with anyone.

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Originally Posted by AcidMaX

It is a business and should be thought of as such.

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Bravo - well said! And worthwhile affiliates understand this. Have you ever tried to join a non-adult affiliate program? If its a worthwhile program, they will screen you first.

Most importantly, lets not forget, HunkMoney is MY business. I can live knowing I lost a few impatient (and probably low-traffic) affiliates, but I cannot live if I lose my merchant account and billing abilities.

cheers,
Luke

This is an interesting discussion to me because it kind of boils down to who needs who more: sponsors or afillates? It seems like the sponsors that do not auto approve have weighed in here, but that's a tiny fraction of all the adult sponsors out there. I've researched this and out of about 100 adult sponsors I looked at, only about 15 required a pre-approval. Does this mean that auto-approvals are best because the majority of sponsors (and some of the largest ones) offer them? I don't know... it's just an observation.

For the few sites that require auto-approval, you absolutely have every right to do this and your reasons certainly make sense to you.

I think the point I was trying to make is that the sites that require pre-approval are looking at this from a "what's easiest and best for me" point of view, where the sites that don't require pre-approval are looking at it more from a "what's easiest and best for my prospective affiliate" point of view.

When you're in business you have to make a choice on what kind of customer service you provide and then live with that decision and the fact that your competitors may be doing it another way. For example, most sponsors have made the decison that making prospective affiliates wait is apparently not good customer service, while others like those who have spoken here feel that asking people to wait 12 hours or so is not a problem. Two different ways of approaching the sponsor-affiliate sign up, although here's something else to consider: the sponsors who provide auto-approval will eventually find out which of their affiliates are high quality and which are frauds. The sponsors that do not pre-approve will never know which high quality affiliates did not sign up because these affiliates simply decided to spend their time signing up with sponsors who welcomed their efforts from the very beginning.

In any event, it sounds like the people here who require pre-approval have thought this through and made the decision that works for them, so more power to 'em!

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Originally Posted by sc32803

The sponsors that do not pre-approve will never know which high quality affiliates did not sign up because these affiliates simply decided to spend their time signing up with sponsors who welcomed their efforts from the very beginning.

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IMHO if someone has quality traffic, and has made the business decision to promote a program, I think they should realize that the 12 hours isn't going to make a difference. If they are that good at traffic generation and sales, they understand that business is business. You have to realize as well that without auto-approval it allows companies to cut back on charge backs. How? Those auto-approved affiliates that send 20 fraudulent sign ups that then charge back and increase the companies charge back ratio, putting their company at risk. What good is a company that is out of business to an affiliate?

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Originally Posted by Lee

I agree, but i screen EVERY single affiliate that joins Condom Cash and i allow the affiliate to start promoting my sites immediately after they signup to the program.

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I`m with Lee on this one!
At TotemCash we let everyone start up immediately, but we have built in fraud detection that catches multiple accounts with same name or same email addy and draws attention to them.
If the refunds and chargebacks start rolling in, then they are blocked.

But, overall, we are open to giving all of our signups the ability to start and we begin the relationship with the belief that we won`t be scammed.

If we didn`t have safeguards, though, I wonder if they would behave differently.

I had one fraudulent affiliate who we blocked with his .com domain and he signed up again the next week with the .net of that same domain! LOL

I guess he was hoping that no one was watching the ship... but he was wrong.

Mary

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Very recently, I signed up to CollegeDudes247.com.
I was prepared to get all set up with linking and the banners and everything. And then I got a page that said "Your account needs approved."
My "sign up" was not approved for 4 days.
Honestly, after the first 10 minutes I was done with them.
This has been about a week now and I still have no intentions on sending them traffic because I signed up with other affiliate programs. I doubt I ever will. It does make webmasters feel uncomfortable in a sense when your sign up or account has to be approved first. When I got that message, the first thing that came to mind is what if later down the road they don't like where the banner is and make the decision to terminate my account or something.
It's just not something that makes you feel right.

However, if using affiliates video clips or images, that I could understand but not banners or text links.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

I wish I had the time to copy/paste all the furious posts from affiliates regarding the placement of banners from sponsors on sites which host stolen content. Or maybe affiliates that wonder when (if ever) that they are going to be paid by sponsors who appear and disappear and then appear again under a different name.

Our chargeback ratio is tiny. Less than 0.2%. That is 2/10ths of one percent. Why? Because we work very hard to be sure that our tour accurately reflects our content and we target our marketing. We do not want to negatively impact this relationship with our processor or damage the relationship with our own merchant account. The bulk of our chargebacks this year were due to affiliate false promotion. You can be sure that not one of those customers is angry with the affiliate but rather with Manifest and what they perceive as "our" false advertising. We are a solo bodybuilder site. If it is promoted with a mini-tour with photoshopped cowboy hats or put forward as a fisting site, well you can pretty much expect that the surfer is going to be pretty pissed off.