Another sponsor dumping affiliates?
 

It appears that Topbucks cancelled my affiliate account after several years. No idea why, as they won't respond to emails or icq, but I guess non-productivity might be a reason. I haven't made a sale from 'em in over a year. |huh Still, they're one of those long-timers where I have so many obscure links all over the place that pulling 'em will be like laser hair removal - one link at a time...

Between sponsors going under, some staying "alive" but ending member-side or affiliate updates, and some outright cancelling affiliate accounts (the bandwidth on those FHGs must really be a major cost) - it's not been a good year so far. Anyone else having to redo a lot of old-time sponsor links?

Topbucks is a solid company. They have been around forever and I don't think they're in the business of alienating affilates. There is probably a sound reason or prehaps a misunderstanding.


You shouldn't have a problem contacting them via ICQ. Anyway I'm sure they'll find this thread.

I know they are raising there min payouts way up, 200.00 min for epass and 100 for checks

i take that as they want full time promoters and higher traffic webmasters

If Lassiter was a newbie webmaster, your response would be appropriate. But he's not. And as plateman stated, TopBucks is definitely making changes.

Looks like my account got closed too. Not that I really care. I have some links up that I will pull if and when I find them. I quit activley promoting them a few years ago.

they been for a time been making changes IMO

Strange , my account still seems active and I don't actively send them traffic anymore

I don't know Lassiter and I did not mean to sound inappropriate..

I based my answer upon what I do know.

1) I've been with Topbucks since 2001.

2) I have two accounts with one not being very active.

3) I have never encountered a situation in all these years where Topbucks didn't go out of their way for affilates.


Yes, I have noticed the minimum payout increases and I do not believe that is a signal of serious change in the direction of deleting of affilates.


I could be wrong. I could wake up tomorrow and have an account(s) closed.

With that said, I hope you guys get your issues resolved.

Strange, my login doesn't work but the password retrieval sends me my login info.

I don't think I have any current links to them anyplace anyway so it really doesn't matter.

Same here... wierd, ah well |smurf|

Works for me and I haven't really pushed them for years.

Actually had a little email chat with the rep lately about why I wasn't sending much traffic anymore. Gave her 4 reasons, and she couldn't give me any good answers.

Nothing in their forum about dropping affiliates.
Shit, $100 in pre-checked X-sales below the submit button.|catfight|

Anyone dropped wouldn't be able to get into the forum to mention it.

Well, that might partially explain the drop in sales. |angry|

I just sent Nadya an ICQ about this thread, so I'm sure she can come over & explain things for us.

No offense taken. :)

But...

Not until now, anyway.

You're right, I shouldn't. And yet, I do. |huh

Nayda/Lilit's ICQ is 400-525-519

She replied a minute after I sent her the message about this thread, so I assume we'll here from her shortly.

Hello Guys!

We performed database clean up and inactive accounts with e-mails bouncing back were deactivated. There was a problem with our system sorting out active and inactive accounts and many active accounts got flagged as inactive. This was the only possible way to actually filter out which accouts are in use and permanently move them to the active group assuming that the webmasters whose accounts were deactivated would contact us and ask to reactivate the accounts.

We apologize for any inconveniences it might cause.

Feell free to hit me or other TopBucks reps up to have your accounts reactivated.

Thanks,

Now my comment on the raised minimum payouts:

The reason for raising minimum payouts was increasing amount of fraud in our program. We need to secure ourselves and the raised minimum payouts will allow us more time to identify fraudulent accounts.

Very clever, I guess. At any rate, I emailed my "Account Representative," Nadya, on Monday, and followed up to "support at topbucks.com" and an ICQ to 168289515 (still showing active as "TopBucks Support") on Tuesday, but my account remains unaccessible as of this writing.

This, IMO, is silly, unprofessional and unnecessary game-playing. My email address with you remains valid and does not bounce (else I would not have received the automated email informing me of my user number and password, which of course had already been inactivated in spite of still being in the auto-reply database).

Thanks for coming on here at least, and letting us know which of us is not wanted/needed as an affiliate. Good luck.

Lassiter, I am Nadya, and I'm your account manager.
I don't have any unresponded e-mails from Monday. I've just checked our ticket system and there were no tickets regarding the issue on Tuesday, August 26 which means your e-mails simply don't get through our spam filters and we need to white list them.

We are not letting you know that we don't need you, as you see we're open and willing to fix this.

Lassiter, I'm hitting you up on ICQ now.

But you said...

So let me make sure I understand this. You deactivated a slew of potentially "inactive" accounts (even ones who were still sending a steady, if small, stream of traffic, such as my own), assuming that anyone who actually cared or noticed would contact you to complain. And yet your active affiliates email addresses of record were not white-listed to begin with and so there would be no way for an affected affilate to notify you. Except for coming on a public board and making a stink.

Really, if you can't see the obvious flaw in the logic here, I need to be applying for a job over there to help y'all straighten it out.

OK, I just spent an hour hashing out all the issues with Nadya and we're friends again and things are ok. So thanks very much, Nadya. (She's actually a very nice person |virgohippy|).

But speaking in general, since this has come up with other sponsors before, and quite recently (Hi Terry!) I think sponsors need to deal with issues like having support emails from their affiliates (to publically posted support addresses) going into the black hole of spam filters. I have all my sponsor addresses white-listed as a matter of necessity, and it would be nice (and cause fewer support headaches and less board drama) if all sponsors reciprocated in kind.

And if a sponsor posts an ICQ address for "support" - I think someone should be assigned to check it daily even if the regular person is on vacation or out of the office.

It's a two-way street, and we need each other. |virgohippy|

Sad to hear that lassiter. :(

I have no problem with TB. All thing are sliding as smooth as before.
Conversion ratios are been bad lately for me, tho (0:2967) for this month and over 600 to join page with no joins.

Does this affect only inactive accounts, or should all of us be 'checking our account' to see if we've been shut off?

I'm not making as many sales with topbucks as I used too, but still get a check every period - is the only way I would know my account is shut off would be if I tried to login and was blocked?

Could my account be shut off now, and I don't know it, but am still sending traffic?

Try to log in and see what happens. I couldn't log in after I saw this thread since I haven't been promoting TP for several years.

The point is, I'm not inactive. I want to know who's being caught up in this sweep. Does it include people like me too? Are they killing everybody but the whales?

Why the fuck should I have to worry about my account and run to the website and try to login like a criminal? What if I don't feel like running around like I've done something wrong, being all "I hope I'm not being screwed", when I've got two automatic payment processing llc checks sitting right in front of me.

It's horrible when sponsors do that. I got a check Monday for $230.81 (still have the stub) that says:
Invoice 15-Aug-06 $104.86
Invoice 15-Sep-07 $125.95

I assume the min payout must be $200 since they've owed me $100 for 2 years. Nowhere in the stats/admin areea is there a min payout area to adjust it.

Now you're also probably wondering why the fuck did it take them this long to send me the check? I moved in July 07 and had to send them my new address 3 different times. AND they asked me to update the address again about a month ago when I emailed them to say I ALREADY DID!!

|loony|

They still have me active and they're lucky if they get around 600 hits per month from me from some random galleries I have on my tgp as fillers. So I don't think it's whale only, but it wasn't exactly handled in the best way possible.

Hello Bill!

This affected only inactive accounts so you have nothing to worry about.

Well, now, I know we're friends again and all |smooch|, but that's not quite true. Stats show I had 881 1st page hits, and 206 join page hits between August 1 and August 24 (which is the date I found my access cut off). That doesn't seem "inactive" to me.

Hi Ramster!

If you login in your webmaster admin you'll find a tab Edit Info on the top of the page. If you click this tab you'll see your minimum payment amount directly editable in Payment Information section. Or as a second option you can contact one of our representatives to have them edit your account information.

We have never had a late payment and if we owed you anything the only possible reason for that would be that you didn't reach your minimum payout on account.

Regarding updating your address - sometimes systems get screwed up and the changes won't go through, sometimes due to post office failures we get webmaster checks bounced back even if they were sent to a correct address. I don't know what exactly was the reason for asking for your address 3 times, but I'm more than sure the only goal of that was making sure that you'll receive your payment.

Lassiter,

Accounts that didn't have sales and sent less than 500 hits a period for 3 mounths combined were considered inactive and were moved to inactive group.

As I've already explained we want to work closer with all our webmasters and we needed to filter out accounts that are in use. Sometimes people sell their sites and forget to close accounts while some links are still up and the program will still receive decent amount of traffic, but actually nobody manages this or that account. We're going to filter out accounts that are in use from such inactive ones and permanently move them to active group.

Cool - could you kill that feeds pop-up that I get every time I log in? I mean, we get it, you want us to use your feeds if and when we start our own paysites.

This is why I no longer sign up for sponsors with minimums above $50 who are not ccbill/verotel.

Also I don't know about others but I consider an account which gets sent 1 click a month active. Even one click could be a sale. And if a company deactivates my account for any reason other than fraud on my part, i make note of them, and the owners, then I make sure to never promote anything they run or even touch again, ever.

Will topbucks be redirecting hits sent from "inactive" accounts which will not get credit for any sales made back to the former affiliates site or the referring page from which the click was sent?

Then you have nothing to worry about, do you? |waves| But I think Lilit has already said what they consider "inactive".

Thanks for the info but it wasn't you guys I was talking about, different sponsor. ;)

But now that I look my account does not work, I cannot log in. I did a forget password to see if I was in the system and it sent me the info but it does not work. Account 8430. Not that it's a big deal, I sent 532 hits last month but still 532 hits doesn't seem "inactive" to me.

Hi Ramster!

I've just reopened your account. Please login and change any information that needs to be updated.
Stay tuned for my messages next week, I'd love to discuss improving your activity at TopBucks especially since I'm your account manager :)

Have a great weekend;)

I noticed I couldn't log in a few days ago aswell, so I removed all topbucks galleries and deleted it off stats remote... I tried again after seeing this thread and my account is back to normal. But there's no way known I'll ever promote topbucks again.

What bothers me is nowdays I just submit galleries from a select few sponsors to some good partner TGPs, will everyone else fuck me over because I didn't send 10 joins this month? I already got locked outta pimproll for god knows what... it sucks not being able to trust who your working for :/

|thumb
And a damn good question. I'd like to hear that the answer is no, but in the name of efficiency and all of that paperwork the megasites have to do, I doubt Ill hear what I'd like to hear.

Just a question: did you look into why you could not log in?

I ask because there was a problem with a sponsor (BangBros?) a while back where people's passwords were not working & it was a database error that they fixed the next day.

Point being that, even though this situation probably did warrant the removal of the links, if you did that & it was a simple error, you'd probably feel silly.