DJ Productions / FatPockets Closing :(
 

Just got this in the mail (as I assume all affiliates did)

*****
September 16th, 2004


Due to several factors including an increase in fraud, a decrease
in renewal and conversion from trial rates, and a slipping U.S.
Dollar, we have no choice but to shut down our advertising program.
All uncashed Bonus Bucks have been forfeited, and our system will
cease tracking traffic on Saturday, September 18th, 2004. Your
earnings from September will be paid when we make our final payout
on October 20, 2004. If you are in the BigTimeCash.com recurring
program, you will be paid by us on October 20, 2004 for your revenue
generated up to October 15, 2004. Revenue generated by your members
after that date will be paid by Paycom.


We thank you for your years of support, and we are deeply sorry
for any inconvenience.

The DJ Productions Team

Recieved same here :(

DD

I just signed up for their QuickHundred program today and starting putting up their links on a site that has a new listing at PK, replacing a sponsor that wasn't converting.
Then, like 2 hours after switching the links I got this email |angry|

their sites have no theme, no special marketing, they had to go down...

I'm on the bigtimecash option and ratios and retention have fallen through the floor since feb-mar this year - but they posted on at least two occassions that x month was the best ever since then so I assumed it was me or bad luck or whatever...

I am afraid that more companies will shut down in the coming years.
I hear more and more webmasters complain about ratios.

Hope that its just an extra long summer slowdown this year and that sales will gett better soon.

sucks for people who promoted them
I never did so I don't really care

I kinda figured this was coming. A friend of mine said they bounced a check to him a couple months ago.

I expect we'll see more of that as spyware and fraud continue to eat this industry |pissed|

I never had much to do with DJ, but I can see a few more going in coming months. I know of one sponsor selling out and one that has stopped updating all sites, while starting another project.

Feel sorry for those that just got sites listed with their ads tho |knockout|

Re: DJ Productions / FatPockets Closing :(
 

This is really the only part that would upset me if I promoted them. I understand having to close down a program for reasons that you can't control. But, aren't the Bonus Bucks actually part of the payout structure? When you have a program for a while, closing it down causes a massive amount of money to come in without any going out. So, they should be able to pay the webmasters what they are owed.

spyware / scumware / malware / redirection software is literally eating the industry from the inside out. On the surface, things are great. Under the skin, though, things are not so good.

Microsoft moving to plug the holes is, as is normal for them, overtly agressive and late. Considering that something like 85% of surfers are using IE, the console will soon die a horrible death. It also puts many of those "pop up blocker" companies right out of business.

Hopefully the government of the US takes action again some of these scumware companies, and let's us all (including mainstream companies) get back to business.

Alex

I couldn't agree more - and to supplement that a little, it's worth mentioning that as nice as Mozilla is (in terms of removing a lot of the threat of spyware/autodownloads) - it's still nearly as useless as the rest of the linux world in that there's very very very limited support for it, and the majority of sites out there don't even display properly on it because the morons who coded it decided that the rest of the world should conform to THEIR standards |angry|

2 days to change all your links out? Ouch.

Webmaster programs are paying these scumbags for their traffic. as long as that continues things will only get worse. for every security hole ms plugs 20 are exploted. and it seems like more and more scum bags are emerging and the honest webmaster is few and far between.

i know a couple of guys that have had trojans installed on their computers from surfing mad thumbs and 89.com

too bad.

Well, no, not really. Mozilla/Firefox conform to all approved HTML standards. It's MS that first started creating tons of "IE-only" code variants and deviations, which only became considered "standard" because lots of web designers started taking advantage of them, even though they didn't conform to the officially-approved standards.

Remember the days of MS FrontPage? You had to turn off the default "FrontPage extensions" to assure full code compatibility with non-MS browsers (or even older IE versions).

As for me, I've been using Mozilla since version 1.1, and Netscape for years before that. Netscape always had its compatibility issues, but Mozilla works fine with literally 99% of sites - not sure where you're going that makes you see problems, but the only sites that I've yet found that were broken in Mozilla were (and still are) MS's own sites, like microsoft.com and msn.com, which they deliberately set up that way just to be nasty. |pcsucks|