Sinbucks Sites Redirecting (Closing Down)
 

I'm seeing all Sinbucks sites redirecting to afternic.com and going to their webmaster page they have:

11/27 - SinBucks Set To Shut Down
Due to wishing to pursue other interests, SinBucks and all of its related websites will be shut down. All the join pages have already been deactivated and new members are not being processed.

I would like to thank you all for the hard work and dedication that you put towards SinBucks. You will be paid on time and in regular form.


Don't recall any email from them, and searching the board looks like no-one else has, so you may want to go through your links and pull those out.

I always wonder why these programs just shut down instead of selling. I realize that often it's due to content licenses not being transferable, but why not sell the sites and affiliate backend so that the new only has to purchase content and feeds?

Useless
If you have a program that runs for a few years, there is much more money in just shutting down the affiliate program and collect the recurring without having to pay webmasters. I'm not sure if this is what sinbucks is doing but, that is a reason to not sell.

And, most affiliate program owners thing their program is worth much more than it really is. For example, Ultracash was supposed to be sold for $10 million. It was never sold and through my thieving partner's actions, processing was shut down since he stopped paying the hosting bill and the sites were taken offline.

Originally that was our plan. He wanted to get out of the business and Sparky and I wanted to stay. We tried to talk him into letting us run the sites but things were afoot. We were supposed to collect our percentage of the recurring but I was cut out. And, I believe Sparky never saw a dime from it either. I know my 20% of several thousand members recurring for a few years was worth quite a bit of money.

So, the question is, are the members still recurring on sinbuck's sites? If so, that is a perfect reason not to sell off the sites and program.

They must have made so much money that they don't even have to think about mundane details as liquidating their property.

Ya think?

remember the solid logic behind that?

He takes his 75%, pays 53% tax, which is greater than your 20%, which means you are making more out of it than he is and he 'made' the company.

And if I recall, the offer was $12.5m USD.

And by the way, the math doesn't work. I guess the fetal position while sitting in a corner is not what gets the check written. :)

Or mundane details like letting affiliates know...:(

ronnie

I do remember that...he wanted us to pay his taxes :)

I also remember him being offered almost $1million for the domain name, freepictures.com but thought it wasn't enough. He was just such a brilliant businessman :)

From what I've heard they did try to sell the program and had no takers.

Yeah, like I said, most affiliate owners think their program is worth much more than it really is. It's always been like that but more so these days.

An affiliate program (at least the 5 sales I have seen in the last year) generally is lucky to get 3x monthly gross anymore. Letting things spool down, dealing with the less frequent customer service requests, pocketing the cash until it gets to a point where it can be shut down usually results in more income in the program owners pocket.

One of the few times where Future Dollars are worth more than Present Dollars.

this is why i am always weary to promote new/small/lesser known sponsors. i'd really like to but who wants to risk losing their recurring? or the 100's of links out there that you would need to change if they go down.

The lesson here is take the PPS and run :D |escape|

Do they run sinhost as an affiliate free host does anyone know? I had an affiliate today that thought a domain was with our freehost, but the nameservers were sinhost. Could help solve a mystery, Scoob. Jinkies!

I would think most affiliate programs could fetch at least 12 months gross, especially an established one with decent excusive or non-exclusive sites.

Then again I'm not selling nor buying programs so what do I know!

I forgot about that little bit o' lasting cash. ;) I need to start drinking more coffee. I'd love to see the numbers on long lasting members who just forget to cancel. I'd bet it's higher than what would be expected.

I absolutely agree with this 100 pct |headbang|

And as to SinBucks, I signed up with it wayyyyy back when Mr. Mitchell from Mojohost owned it. I never really promoted it though because the niche on the sites were already oversatured.

You would be surprised. Tiny numbers but several have recurred for over 12 months. The oldest one now has recurred 16 times.

I am not going to get into a pissing contest about pps but my numbers on the average length of a subscription do not indicate that is the route for an affiliate to take if he is dealing with a trusted sponsor.

Now keep in mind that I know nothing about analyzing numbers.

Hi Tom,
Sinhost is a hosting company aka mojohost. All my nameservers are still sinhost. I wish it was free :D

Hello Everyone,

Just returned from Vegas and picked this up on Boardwatcher so I wanted to stop by for a point of clarification. I apologize, firstoff, because this is one of the webmaster boards where I emailed a long time ago to change my username from 'SinEmpire' to 'Brad Mitchell' and the request just never got fulfilled.

Long story short - I sold SinBucks a long time ago to a new owner and FatBaby and I both trained and supported him as long as was needed. His decision to persue other interests a few months ago led to me purchasing the assets back. I did confirm to the best of my abilities that final webmaster payouts were done. What I have now are simply the domain name assets. All portions of the actual sites and program have been shutdown and any remaining recurring members were cancelled some time ago.

To make sure there was no confusion about my interests in these assets, they are simply listed on Afternic - not at all redirected to any other traffic program. I took an interest in repurchasing the assets primarily out of my own stubborness. The idea that if the person I chose to sell it to wasn't going to run it anymore than I would simply assist in a graceful shutdown and reclaim the domain names for possible but unprobable future development. I really did not want the program to proceed on to a third owner, potentially one that I did not know, because of any association or confusion that might result from it being a 'Sin' property which was obviously my previous brand name.

I am regretful that the program did not continue under the new ownership but did have enough involvement post-purchase to see that the affiliates who were sending traffic were being taken care of properly. At the end of the day, it was a very low traffic program that never came into it's own.

Best of luck to everyone-

Brad

Brad, good to see you posting and clearing things up a it. It's too bad those guys didn't send an email out to people to let the affiliates know.

I was told that the affiliates sending traffic and making sales from the months preceeding the shutdown were notified by email. This would have been an email to dozen or so people receiving checks regularly but not the other thousand webmasters that were not sending traffic. The proof of that, really, is that when it was shutdown there were only a thousand or two thousand hits daily to all of the web sites from all sources including the SE traffic that the sites were getting. Anyways, I am dissapointed that things did not work out but still pleased that everyone was paid appropriately.

Brad

I have had similar experiences ... and a few times over which makes me an idiot who keeps walking into these landmines. :)

Partners are a huge pain in the rear end :)


Edit: But even thought I might get flamed for this ... a program that changes hands even once is a program to be avoided at all costs... at least until they build their rep back over 1-2 years.

If Ultracash changed hands from my thieving partner to Sparky and myself, nobody would have even noticed. People around back then thought I owned Ultracash anyway. People dealt with me, got paid by me and Sparky ran the back-end. The thief once took a year long sabbatical to go across Canada :) During that year, we made more money than any other time. The only time we lost money was when we did what the thief wanted us to do. Such as...freepictures.com as a free host where we had none of our own banners. I remember paying $100k bandwidth bills back then. We were forced to use sextracker for servers, software and bandwidth. Never a good idea anyway you slice it.