Howling Wulf » Sponsor Tricks

Hidden cross sales and more

Howling Wulf — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:18:17 +0000

Cross sales are a strong, valid marketing strategy for extending a purchaser additional offers for related products, usually at a special discount. This has been around long before the internet, and not limited to the adult business. Such as when you get a magazine subscription and can check a box for a related magazine subscription for a discounted price. The problem is when unscrupulous companies misuse cross sales to trick the purchaser (and sometimes the affiliates) into taking these offers and increasing their profits.

The first and most prevalent misuse is hidden cross sales. This is when the pre-checked offers are beneath the form’s submit button, so that the purchaser will hopefully not even see the cross sales before he submits his form info. That’s the only reason to place the cross sales beneath the submit button. This leads to pissed off members who can suddenly get additional charges on their credit card they weren’t aware of and feel scammed, increasing the percentage of charge backs and surfers who are now wary of signing up to any more sites. It’s a short term run to increase profits at the surfer’s expense. Check out this sample join page still being used – the two pre-checked cross sales are well below the form and ‘Complete Transaction’ button. They’re also presented as ‘free access’ instead of optional offers. The surfer has to read the fine print to find out they’re actually not free at all. If you don’t mind fucking over the surfers, then you won’t mind promoting sponsors using hidden cross sales.

Another sponsor trick is against their own affiliates. On revshare programs, where the sponsor and affiliate is supposed to share generated revenues, the sponsor adds cross sales to other programs and so keep all the cross sale revenues. It’s a way to piggy back on the traffic an affiliate sends to increase their profits. The affiliate doesn’t get any part of these sales when sending traffic. This may be acceptable when the sponsor is paying per sale, when the cross sales generated are included when they determined the payout amount, but on revshare, they’re just not sharing. They’re skimming your traffic for additional revenues. Not only does the join page image above use hidden cross sales, it was generated on a revshare link.

In summary, before you join any new program, be sure to check for all the sponsor tricks you dislike and be strong in your convictions.

Sponsors not crediting all sales? Believe it.

Howling Wulf — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:08:53 +0000

It’s called ‘shaving’, when a sponsor that has it’s own affiliate program doesn’t credit all the sales you’ve made in order to boost their bottom line. Somewhere during the signup process, the software would somehow ‘lose’ your affiliate code. Almost impossible to see and therefore prove. This was a big issue during the ‘early years’, until some webmasters started doing test signups and noticed they didn’t get credit. At first those shaving sponsors blamed it on a software glitch or similar, until things reached a head in 2003 when someone posted a screenshot of the PIBCash affiliate admin showing shaving built in.

PIBCash blamed an ex-employee of editing the stats page html and adding in those columns. However early in 2004 the roof collapsed when a supposed disgruntled programmer at PIBCash left the affiliate admin system open before he left the company and some webmasters logged in and saw the shaving for themselves. They were shaving and lying about it the entire time. Original threads at
GFY – OMG PIBCASH WAS cheating like a mother fucker! >> Real PROOF ! <<
GFY – So.. PIBCash Shaves.. Sucks to be you!
Porno Junkies – DRAMA HERE! PIBCash caught shaving

It’s probable that many sponsors still shave, but besides PIBCash, proof is almost impossible to obtain and circumstantial at best. Watch your ratios and promote the best ones. Just know what shaving is and how it works.

Other interesting ‘proof of shaving’ threads:

Dollars 4 All
SPA Cash

Are adult affiliates getting credit for mobile traffic?

Howling Wulf — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:22:53 +0000

The answer is ‘probably not’. Some adult affiliate programs are redirecting any mobile traffic you send to their sites, and some of them are NOT giving you credit for any sales. It’s blatant theft of your adult traffic and you won’t even notice it in your stats unless you happen to surf your own sites with a mobile device, OR you can fake your Firefox browser to act like one.

Here’s how to do it with Firefox. Download and install the User Agent Switcher add-on. After restarting the browser, select Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options. Then select User Agents -> Add and fill out the following in the form:

Description = iPhone
User Agent = Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
APP Name = AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
APP Version = Version/3.0
Platform= Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Then choose ‘iPhone’ in the Tools -> User Agent Switcher menu and start surfing some of your affliate codes. It didn’t take long for me to find three sponsors who were redirecting my mobile traffic and not giving me credit! The only sponsor I found who redirects mobile traffic correctly is Topbucks, who not only passes on the affiliate code, but also asks the mobile surfer if they want the original site, or the porn site built specifically for mobile devices. That’s a nice touch.

6/18 UPDATE
Just 6 days after posting this article, one of the adult programs announced they will now be tracking affiliate codes when they redirect the mobile traffic to their mobile site.

I also received a support response from another adult program about their mobile redirecting:

“We do not credit mobile sales coming from pc sites.

There are several reasons for this:

1) We do not pay the same PPS for a mobile join as we do for a pc join.
This being said, we cannot credit you for a sale that is sent through a pc
site.
2) We have conducted tests and users are very unlikely to join our site
with an unoptimized join page, therefore, even if you are sending surfers by
chance to Baby Got Boobs, you would have not gotten a sale.”