I never published them because there were only 2 or 3 sposnors that I had a decent amount of before & after data for (and those were pretty much the same)

But I can go thru some now, like Meat Cash would be a great one for me to compare.

Any other ideas? Who else did Dee Cash buy up where I'd have 6 months of Nats stats to go with my pre-nats numbers.

Meatcash. Oh how I loved you so.

As Grennie well knows, the day Meatcash changed to NATS my stats plummeted. My belief was and still is, that this is because from day1 of their NATS install they moved to a 1 hour cookie life. They had always been good to me, up until they realized how much more money they could make by taking away my return sales. The surfers I introduced to their product that came back after the 1 hour cookie had died off.

I believe I lost 90% of my sales and eventually income as the rebills died off from that one paradigm shift. :(

Of course now I've heard that Dee has cancelled production on most of their sites now and rebills are declining as well.

Given those factors, maybe Meatcash isn't that great a choice of comparison. |huh

My comparison would be just ratios & on a site-by-site basis.

If you guys can do the research, I'll write the paper - give me a list to work with!

Hmm. As a preliminary here are some programs deecash seems to have bought.

http://badgirlbucks.com
E*** Cash (Greenie know who I mean)
http://jasonandalex.com/index.php
http://extremepaychecks.com/
http://triplexcash.com/
http://ragecash.com/
http://elitedollars.com/ (I think?)
http://nichedsites.com/
http://nats.badgirlbucks.com/
http://mayorsmoney.com/
http://joinrightnow.com/ (long LONG ago this was a ccbill program)


I'm sure there are MANY more. :D But I guess we need to start somewhere. You are looking only for ones which were ccbill before and went to nats or just switched to nats from whatever?

I'm not looking for just Dee Cash sites - I'll do some homework when I get home - I'm due for a stats run anyway :)

My sales for Rage Cash actually increased post-NATS - which I was pleasantly surprised about after reading some stories as to what could be done with NATS numbers and cookie life.

I thought Rage Cash was launched with NATS. |huh

No, they used partnersoft until dee bought them and switched them to nats.

Twistys just switched to nats, but that's been very recent. Probably too recent for you to compare yet.

No Im pretty sure when Dee bought them and Extreme paychecks it switched to NATS..I could be wrong though

Wow - this just pissed me off, because I just built a site promoting Meat Cash |cry|

I started pushing CCBill sponsors because of this board and it was a good decision for sure.

Fucking great. I just added all of their sites to my banner rotator something like a week ago. Now I need to waste some more time to remove them |pokefun| |banghead|

I've decided that with future stats runs I'll be adding yet ANOTHER column that will contain my pre-Nats ratios for programs that switched over.

When that next run will be is up in the air, as I need to finish some other projects 1st.

I think it may be time to start a new thread about cookie lifetimes used by various sponsors. Maybe we can come up with a big list of sponsor names and how long their cookies live before expiring. That's something that could be valuable to a webmaster deciding on which sponsor programs to start promoting. It could also be valuable to webmasters who are already affiliates of particular sponsors, but have no idea how the sponsors handle their cookies. Might even be worth adding as a column to the current sponsor info available in the sponsors list on this board.

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a message that differs between sponsors who use 255-day cookies (the max CCBill allows) and those who use things like 1-hour cookies. Seriously, is there any reason to use short cookies besides depriving a webmaster of an earned commission as early as possible?

If a webmaster sends someone to a tour and he gets interrupted by something before he can join but goes back later, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or whenever, I think the original webmaster who sent that surfer deserves a commission if he was the last affiliate who sent that surfer to the sponsor's tour.

All traffic has some cost and therefore some value, even if only the time and work that went into building the pages or writing the posts which originally convinced the surfer to visit the tour page. Short cookies seem to say that the sponsor doesn't believe our traffic has much value to them. Which makes me think it may not be a very good idea to send our traffic to them either.

Anyone else feel it's time we called out the sponsors who use shorties?



.

So what I'm hearing is that during a default install of NATS, you get a 1 hour cookie expiration. I started promoting MeatCash post NATS and was doing great until they got bought out. My sales went to shit, but I'd like to believe it was due to them not updating their tour during the transition.

Yes me :)

No, I believe that the default is 10 days because that is what most of my sponsors have. Another sponsor I have is set to only 3 days, but them and Meatcash were the only 2 I had below the standard 10 days.

I think it is a great idea as well.

I like to use http://web-sniffer.net/ to check cookies but there are other ways as well.

Your point about the reason for using a smaller cookie is well taken. One thing I have learned over the years is to look for little signs from sponsors to see if they respect me as an affiliate and to check if they seem to be doing everything possible to take my money. Little things like this indicate their philosophy when it comes to affiliates. These little things often say quite a bit. :)

Well, I was going to ask how you can tell what the duration of a cookie is but I guess that's been answered...

Simon, I actually was thinking the same thing along these lines. I'd like to know what programs use in regards to cookie life. As I myself feel that it reflects greatly with the number of sales, and probably has a lot more to do with low numbers than some much more easy to point the finger at scenarios. And even though the scenarios are surely to blame for some lack of sales, Im sure cookie life is a key part as well.

Do programs usually keep that info in their terms & conditions section? If not, there should be an open invite for program owners/reps to provide that information.

That websniffer is scaring the hell out of me.

I just put in some recent affiliate links. OUCH.

I know, tell me about it. :(

A few days ago here Ccbill Paul said they will consider adding display of the cookie length setting in the ccbill lounge on a per-program basis:

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...56&postcount=5

I hope they do. It would make it much easier to monitor.

Forgive my total newbie question but Twisty's just switched over to NATS recently.Does that mean I have to pull all my pre-NATS hosted galleries and change all my free site link codes etc. or should I be ok?|confused|

Hey Star Man. Not a stupid question. You don't need to change them we have taken care of everything so it will redirect and still track but we always recommend switching over to the new codes. Hit me up if you have any questions. ICQ: 215-457-848 or Kevin at Twistys dot com.

question I just ran that web sniffer on an affiliate link of mine and it shows 3 cookie rows, 2 of them show cookies expire today at 6pm, is that what I am reading?
example:

Set-Cookie: x_wm_login=buttster1; expires=Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:00:19 GMT
Set-Cookie: x_sub=deleted; expires=Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:54:18 GMT
Set-Cookie: x_ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb-sniffer.net%2F; expires=Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:00:19 GMT