Sponsors that delete inactive affiliates/webmasters
 

So what do you all do about sponsors that have policies of deleting inactive affiliates? Do you just not promote them? Or does it make you want to promote them a lot? Do you agree with them that this is an okay thing to do?

I am just never going to understand sponsors that do that and be able to see them as anything but trying to take advantage of webmasters with less time, traffic, etc. I will never comprehend the advantage (except theft) of deleting affiliates who have never defrauded you, etc.

This is a pretty timely topic for me. After an extended absence I just finished going through all my accounts, and about a third of them had me locked out and aren't returning emails. I've still got some patience left, but several of them always converted quite well on my traffic.

Ugh. That is fucked up. Does anyone have a blacklist set up of sponsors who do this? While I do think some of deletes happen semi-honestly when sponsors transition from ccbill to NATS, etc. for the most part I think it's just a really shitty thing to do based purely on inactivity. I got an email recently from voyeur-cash saying they're policy is to delete after only 30 days of inactivity. Sounds like a good excuse to take advantage of people's work and skip out on committing to rewarding them for it over the long haul.

Agreed. When it's all said and done I may have to build a little "Sponsors Who Have Fucked Me" page and link it in my sig.

Yep, that would be great to have a list of such sponsors. Personally i can't understand why they delete inactive affiliates? Does it cost them too much money to keep those affiliates in a database?

If I see a new sponsor I want to promote I'll sign up and put it on my todo list. If the list is long I won't get to it for awhile. If I'm locked out it's a loss for both of us.

In these hard times, I suspect some sponsors are doing this to keep the money in affiliate accounts that haven't reached the minimum payout.

That's probably part of it, but we have a long memory. It's just bad business, no matter the short term gain.

Homegrown Video inactive affiliate policy
 

We don't cancel accounts unless there is a substantial reason to do so, like account fraud. Instead, we have found that the expense of going back to inactive affiliates and trying to find a way to get them profitable again is justified in most cases.

I would personally be suspicious of any program that cancelled a previously active account, but would not have a problem with those that cancelled an account that never sent a sign up in the first place... but of course only after a reasonable effort to make them active and successful first.

Interestingly, you see this sort of thing happening I think when people are looking to scrape a cent together any way possible and would take it as a red flag about the stability of the program - even though I know those same programs would argue that cancelling those affiliates is good overall for the program. Spin is wonderful thing... until you get so dizzy you puke.

Yea, just doesn't make sense to me unless you were changing your backend and wanted to consolidate your DB but even them I would want to keep as many possible affiliates in the system.

Yeah, as a company that has been through that process too many times, that is the biggest bitch to deal with but one which is an effort that has always paid off down the road.

There were quite a number of my sponsors that overhauled their backends and completely switched stats systems, and had no issues just keeping my account rolling and collecting rebills/signups. Therefore, I am forced to conclude that whatever caused these sponsors to delete/lock me out, while I was still sending traffic, was not a technical issue.

To me it's just about as stupid as telling members of a paysite that they will be locked out if they don't login to the members area once a week . . . but they'll keep charging you!

I don't like being pestered by affiliate managers either: I like being spammed with promo content by sponsors basically and if they keep doing it on a regular basis and it keeps looking good, then eventually an affiliate will be "sold" on promoting them and/or not forget them.

Duly noted... we were already well aware of the "affiliate manager that can do nothing better than beg like a little bitch for more traffic but little else" syndrome and have avoided that like the plague.

By the way, we have some interesting cross promo opportunities opening up again. If you want info let me know and I will hit you up when it is ready.