[whitey]

Interesting that you post that today.

I had been away from the business for several years and have recently returned to it - about 6 months ago.

Last week, I started to promote a particular site beginning with a blog post and had created a couple of galleries to link through a couple of fake tgps in my trafffic network. As soon as I started sending traffic, I got a deleted account notice from ccbill for that affiliate account.

I contacted the webmaster and their VP of Marketing replied, basically saying they are cleaning up affiliates that had not made sales in the past year. As of right now, the situation is unresolved. I am, however, not happy because I just spent half a day last week working on tools to promote the site.

While I believe the situation is largely coincidental, I still do not understand the logic, particularly for CCBill programs.

1. It really costs them nothing to retain the affiliates.

2. The downside if they are using sales as a number is that they are basically stealing traffic subsequent to the deletions of all affiliates that have links up to them.

3. People promoting sites through CCBill use man of those sites for a variety of reasons (including fill in links) and many of them are not our primary sponsors. As secondary sponsors, their traffic is normally less and the webmaster is hoping to pick up a sale now and then. Regardless, the links are up and deleting the accounts is fundamentally a method of stealing traffic.

4. You may just delete someone that has just put in a bit of work for your program, pissing them off.

Ultimately, this is a business. Since it costs them nothing to keep the affiliate account open, there is no good business reason to delete an affiliate account, unless of course one simply wants to take the traffic. Even if affiliates are notified, changing links in multiple scripts simply is something that gets added to the to do list.

I would also say that should a program only want affiliates that are going to promote their site as a primary site, the program should...

1. Opt out of CCBill affiliate management system and go to cascading processing using a NATs style system. This provides the webmaster dedicating time to the site more opportunities to make a sale, more information, and an easier interface. If they expect to be a primary sponsor, they should consequently make the investment necessary to be perceived as a primary sponsor.

2. Make their program invitation only.

Realistically, in todays environment, there are very few programs that are viable enough and/or arrogant enough to take that strategy. There is just too much attrition and fluidity in the affiliate marketing world today.

BTW, I have not identified the program because I am exchanging emails with them right now and do not wish to start unecessary drama other than pointing out how illogical the strategy deployed was.