Seems only fair to ask the counter question, if affiliates are going to be poked with the "entitlement" stick.
Educate us annoying affiliates, oh great program owners. :p
:joker:
Seems only fair to ask the counter question, if affiliates are going to be poked with the "entitlement" stick.
Educate us annoying affiliates, oh great program owners. :p
:joker:
Program owners are entitled to ontime payouts from their processors, in addition to help with any processing related support issues.
If they have purchased scripts, then they are entitled to support, technical or otherwise in making sure those scripts work continuously.
They are also entitled to set the rules of their program and change them as they see fit, in addition to being able to manage their sites how they see fit in order to turn a profit for them, and their affiliates.
Thats all i expect as a program owner $0.02
Regards,
Lee
Running programs "as they see fit" is a rather broad entitlement.
Would removing revenue-generating affiliates for any reason (or no reason) and keeping all current and future proceeds be a fair entitlement, for example?
Yes, a program owner can do whatever he (or she) wants, its their program after all.Originally Posted by HotMaleVideos
Its up to YOU as an affiliate to decide if you want to keep promoting that program or not.
As an example, last week i removed 10 affiliates from Condom Cash, even though they had an active member base and rebills due, was that wrong of me to do?
Regards,
Lee
Depends on the circumstances for their removal. Barring some unusual circumstances, why would it be right? Because "I'll do what I want" is in the terms?
Well...
Lets say of the 10 affiliates, who between them generated 30 sales, all of them were from China and all but 5 of the sales chargedback for 'fraud' reasons, was that right for me to remove them?
Now, without knowing that, lets say 1 or 2 of those affiliates decides to post on a board that i was *shaving* their sales and cancelled their account, how many people do you think are going to *beleive* them without asking *why* their acct was shit-canned?
As a program owner, if i cant run *MY* business as *I* see fit, these affiliates may not have been cancelled and they could have continued to cost *ME* money for months to come.
What if these 10 affiliates were making sales but the traffic was coming from a warez site, would cancelling their accounts and removing the sales still be 'right'?
What if these affiliates were based in North Korea, all of their sales were legit and there were no other problems, would removing their acct still be right?
Regards,
Lee
simply put, yes it was right and mostlikely fully justified in your terms and conditions..
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Therein we get to the issue at hand.
A programs terms and conditions, if they are written well enough, allow for a program owner to do anything they want.
If an affiliate doesnt like it, all they can do is choose to stop sending traffic.
Bottom line, before joining a program, read (and understand) its terms of service because whether you like it or not, by joining the program as an affiliate you are agreeing to be contractually obligated to those T.O.S
Regards,
Lee
Which is why I qualified the question with "unusual circumstances." I don't think many would disagree that they were likely reasonable terminations.
I'm just saying "as I see fit" is a very broad entitlement and potentially subject to abuse just as much as it is for legit/legal reasons. I'm trying to find where some program owners and affiliates might be at such a crossroads in some (apparent) cases that could tempt owners to find ways to penny-pinch ethical partners.
Relating to the other thread, I don't think an owner is entitled to 100% of rebills if an ethical affiliate can't deliver or convert traffic any longer, for example. I would suggest they legally and legitimately earned their share. Is that an unfair sense of entitlement on my part?
Mike,
Thats isnt really a 'program owner entitlement' or even an 'affiliate entitlement' issue though, its a trust issue, if you cant trust that a program owner isnt going to rip you off for no reason, you shouldnt be sending them traffic/sales.
Penny-pinching, to some extent is a good thing, for example a sponsor a couple of years back announced they were going to be adding a bunch of new upsells to their members areas, affiliates went crazy about this, until they realized that the sales to these new upsells were being split between the SPONSOR and the AFFILIATE.
Methods of generating additional income on paysites is something that everyone should be concerned about, program owners, affiliates, content providers, even designers, its when these new income generators become counter-productive that affiliates need to start worrying and again, in instances where that does happen, all the affiliate has to do is switch their traffic to someone else but what can the program owner do if they have un-productive affiliates, absolutely nothing it would seem.
Regards,
Lee
I think that a program owner should have the prerogative to administer his/her program in a way that profitable to the program owner and yet fair to affiliates.
If you have an affiliate that the evidence is clear that something isn't on the up-and-up (i.e., bunch of chargebacks) then terminating them is certainly reasonable.
But let's take a different example: another affiliate who, for example, was sending a bunch of traffic but now isn't sending any new traffic, yet still getting rebills. It would not be reasonable to terminate that affiliate, at least under most programs.
Now... if, for example, you offered some special deal where you gave an affiliate a bigger-than-normal cut, with the understanding that the affiliate was entitled to rebills only as long as they continued sending traffic, and the affiliate stopped sending traffic, then you'd be well within your rights to terminate.
For me, it's all about honest communication with webmasters. If your business model changes or you have increased fraud, or something else, and you have to change terms, so be it. Just communicate honestly to affiliates, try not to "retroactively" change terms, and I think you're well within your rights to set the rules and terms that your program runs under.
So the answer is maybe?
Traffic can be redirected, but it isn't free. I'm sure plenty of program owners see themselves as the hard workers and their affiliates as disposable dime-a-dozen, but I don't think owners are entitled to whimsically nix ethical affiliates and keep their active proceeds after having invested their own time/effort/money into the partnership. Yes, affiliates must definitely trust the program owner isn't greedily operating the program at their expense. And owners must trust affiliates aren't warez and CP shitbags, and the like. But greed isn't an entitlement in any dictionary I'm aware of, which is what the example I gave basically amounts to.
You kind of sound victimized to say, "What can PO's do? Apparently nothing," which is unfortunate. You had the luxury of choosing to work with affiliates. It's only reasonable to keep it fair and pay them what they ethically earned. If they aren't owed anything and aren't delivering traffic, purge to your database's content. But shaving them out of the system if they've done no wrong wouldn't strike me as fair entitlement, however.
But nobody has actually said that has happened, it was a hypothetical question that everyone seems to have taken as 'fact' when that wasnt the case at all.
As you said, there are reasons when deleting an affiliate is a good thing, just as there are when deleting an affiliate is a bad thing, most program owners on GWW and industry wide, are going to treat affiliates with the respect they deserve unfortunately, that same respect isnt always given back to program owners by their affiliates.
I guess for me, if i ask a program to raise my payouts because i can send them X amount of sales, i really dont mind going back to the regular pay levels when i stop sending the amount of sales agreed upon in order to get the raised payouts to begin with.
Regards,
Lee
No disagreements there.
Any other program owners want a stab? :x
Im guess they'd rather have you keep sending traffic without knowing the behind the scenes stuff. You'll be lucky if you can get another program owner to be as honest as i am with everyone LOL
Dont forget, most programs treat all their affiliates the same and value them all equally, even though we know that isnt the case
Regards,
Lee
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