How can you tell if a program is fixed?

[Squirt]

I belong to several affiliate programs that I make great money on.. but how do I know some aren't fixed?

[desslock]

make a test purchase.

Steve

[Dawgy]

shaving is a fact of life in this industry.

the question is, will u make more money sending to sponsor A who is shaving, but paying $40 a join, or sponsor B who isnt shaving but paying only $20 per join

the only way to really know for sure you arent being shaved is to use someone with processor stats you can look at, or affiliate software like NATS that has no shave feature built in like other software on the market.

[cj.]

If a program is going to shave you, its not always going to be a straight % off the top ... which is easy to test for, you just do a test sale every now and again (& inform the program owner once its showed up in your stats so they don't think you are cheating).

Some programs have been caught out doing things like redirecting joins to a different processor etc, so having access to the processor stats is not going to help you if the joins aren't making it to that processor.

As Dawgy said, it comes down to how much you make per click at the end of the day.

Is that what you meant by 'fixed'?

[Lee]

As Dale said unfortunatly, for the most part shaving is part and parcel with the adult industry, there are exceptions though

The biggest problem with shaving etc is that a lot of it goes on everyday by almost every company however, it is never questioned because it isnt called 'shaving' it is called 'trading traffic' for example, out of every 10 hits you send to a sponsors tour, 7 of those hits will go to a different sponsors site without crediting you with a sale.

There is also 'internal' shaving like when a member joins a paysite goes to view a feed and can 'buy' time or movies from those feeds.

As with marketing.. if you put enough of a 'spin' on something and are good employing 'smoke and mirrors' you can get away with virtually anything especially when, every other program does it too.

The question shoudl be.. just because everyone else does it, does that make it right?

Regards,

Lee

[Squirt]

Thanks for your input guys I appreciate it!

CJ "Is that what you meant by 'fixed'?"

Yes you hit the nail on the head! I had no idea that some people would go so far as to redirect to a different processor!

Lee "The question should be.. just because everyone else does it, does that make it right? "

No it isn't right. I expect when I'm getting kickass conversions on sites with CCBill , that when I join privately run affiliate programs, my traffic converts just as well.

I have highly target traffic and the way my advertising is setup, the cheaters stand out pretty well.

At the end of the day traffic is gold and every subscription we give a site has value. For someone to arbitrarily divert your traffic, or not count your subscriptions, is fraud isn't it?

Is there a list somewhere of programs known to shave? If it's a common practice, and accepted, then do these people state in their TOS that they shave or divert traffic?

[cj.]

Originally posted by Squirt
At the end of the day traffic is gold and every subscription we give a site has value. For someone to arbitrarily divert your traffic, or not count your subscriptions, is fraud isn't it?

Is there a list somewhere of programs known to shave? If it's a common practice, and accepted, then do these people state in their TOS that they shave or divert traffic?

Yes, it is fraud ... and no, nobody is going to say 'we pay $30 per signup / shaved 20%'. Shaving was started initially to do what Lee said - smokes & mirrors - we pay $X more than that other sponsor so send us your traffic.

Shaving can otherwise be called 'making a profit margin for the sponsor' ... we created this mess where sponsors had to pay more and more per signup to get the traffic, as time went on surfers stopped paying for subscriptions and sponsors started throwing bigger parties and giving away prizes on top of paying for traffic etc. All of a sudden those 50% profit margins became 5% and 'shaving' became an almost standard part of business.

However, just because a program has a good payout doesn't mean they are shaving you ... just look at their business model and see if you can figure out how they are paying the amount they pay.

Take into account things like cross sells (not for long!), retention, cost of content for that niche, subscription cost, do you get credit for exits, does the company do a high volume of sales etc ...

If it doesn't make sense ... ask your sponsor. Most will explain their model to you - especially if they have nothing to hide ;-)

[neilxod]

No Fixing and the only shaving done here is in my shower at 6am!!

www.webmaster@xondemand.com Sign up!

Affiliate program!!!

Hugs,
N.