Affiliate Programs That Make You Wait To Be 'Approved'

[AcidMaX]

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.

[HunkyLuke]

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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

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

[sc32803]

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!

[AcidMaX]

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.

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?

[Maryflixxx]

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.

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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[derekt]

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?

[Alex_Manifest_M]

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.