(potentially?) controversial topic - Sponsors vs Affiliates

[Carrie]

Precisely.

I've received some rather venomous private messages on this board in the past, even, when someone was interested in promoting us and wanted free content and I told them I could not provide them with that.

Not even 5 sample assorted pics? (As you can tell, I've never been inside your webmaster area, .)
I've signed up for lots of sponsors, gotten inside of their webmaster area and found they had no content available at all (not even 5 pics). The tours were fantastic and right on-target with their niche and I would have needed some of their specific content to do it right. With no pics at all, it was either email them and wait for a response, or move on... always I just moved on. When I have the opportunity to build (ie no kids around) and a specific idea burning in my head, waiting means the project gets put onto the eternal backburner, never to return.

What's really frightening is getting into these webmaster areas and finding notes like "we're reworking all of our content to comply with 2257 and will have some up for you when that's done". Makes me think the stuff inside the member's area isn't legal, and sometimes the date on the note is over a year old so it tells me they're really not interested in getting things fixed.

But, I would advocate at least having a *few* pics to promote with; there are different promotional styles. Like when I build an SE page, I usually put a nice 200x300 sample pic and wrap lots of good text around it. My need for a few pics doesn't automatically mean I'm going to go spam the TGPs or P2P networks, . (Although I do make TGP galleries from time to time if there's enough content or I can buy my own that'll fit the site. With sites getting more and more exclusive though, buying content gets harder.)

[CorbinFisher_BD]

hehe if they'd asked for 5 sample pictures that would have been something else entirely.

With these blog sites popping up left and right, the vast majority of content requests were webmasters asking for access to the site so they could post pictures with each update. So pretty much indefinite access to content. That's a big part of why we felt we had to step in and slow things down. A lot of affiliates were wanting unlimited amounts of content, seeing as they could pretty much get unlimited amounts of content and FHGs and video clips and this and that from so many other sponsors out there.

A few times, I tried saying "OK, but if you could only take like 15 or so pics per update that'd be great" the affiliate didn't much like that idea at all, said everyone else was giving them unlimited amounts, and needed unlimited if they were going to have any

So we did want to offer our affiliates more, but had to look at ways to do that while still retaining control over content distribution and not diluting our content or flooding the web with our stuff for free.

We will be launching CorbinPays.com shortly, which will be our webmaster resource site for our new and exclusive-access program that will have content for the select affiliates we will have, including:

- banners made specifically for individual affiliates (co-branded with us and them)
- content shot specifically for individual affiliates and provided to them to share with their surfers
- other free content to use on their sites
- a wide array of banners/graphics

among other things.

I definitely think you're right, Carrie, that affiliates obviously need resources from the sponsors and that'll help em both do well with the partnership. We just couldn't see how we'd go about giving as much as possible to affiliates without giving away the farm, so to speak. Until, that is, we decided to limit the number of affiliates and go controlled-access. Then, the problem was solved hehe