Best thing to do when a sponsor goes belly up or just stops paying?
 

I see an awful lot of promotional going 404 this year.

Doing a search and replace of one's affiliate code risks getting a DMCA so 404ing the stuff seems like the easiest and really about the only way to go.

I miss the old days of build and forget. Now it is build and delete after your sponsor goes belly up and just stops paying.

Right now I have a search on my local server mirror in progress of another sponsor that has stopped paying. :(

I think I would risk the DMCA and replace the codes but its a tough one ... certainly dont wanna keep feeding them traffic.

I say replace the linking code with another sponsor, probably a dating program or something generic, and wait for the DMCA. Fuck them. They're all greedy peasants who act as if they woke up one morning and suddenly decided to close their affiliate programs within the following 24 hours. On the most part, they've known for months that they would stop crediting affiliate sales, and intentionally give next to no notice in order to keep the traffic rolling in.

Since I haven't gotten back into building free sites yet, it's easy for me to just remove all ads & such from my LL & TGPS.

I am already thinking about when I do get back to building, and the records I'm going to have to keep for when sponsors go belly up again. I know a lot of you have gone through hell searching down everything.

Actually it is pretty easy for me. I keep a local copy of my server using rsync and use BBEdit to find all instances of my link code and then a do a quick rm-rf on all the directors that contain my link codes on my server.

OK, I'm a little confused by mention of DMCA, who I'm assuming means the copyright people. Am I wrong, is there another organisation/law/whatever called DMCA that I should know about? Or are you guys saying "I'd just change the link but keep using their banners/free content? Or am I missing something important?

I personally don't wish to risk getting a DMAC notice due to a sponsor's content and banners going to another sponsor so I 404 everthing. Anyway I just find it easier to 404 the stuff.

Might depend how they close as well - if they go out of business, close the sites and disappear - youre not likely to be hit by a DMCA. If theyre just not crediting anymore, it might be more risky...so yeah, 404 prolly isnt so dumb on second thought, though that might piss of alot of people linking/listing etc...

What Useless Warrior said |thumb

I can't speak for others but these days I just delete the stuff that went 404 each morning.

The only thing that would piss my off is if someone left the index page up on a free site and deleted the sub pages since my bot wouldn't catch that.

Although on my own stuff I've started putting up a 404 page that explains that the page is missing hoping that I don't piss off anyone.

I would go for the changing link codes, at least until I get a DCMA if they actually want to get in contact me. |club|

And if they owe me money, I would consider it a lien on their assets until they do pay. |catfight|

I'll have to ask the judge on the weekend what he thinks? |whisper|

As a gallery submitter my action or reaction depends on what happens with the sponsor. If they just close down and I never hear from them, then I just swap out the linking code to another site - I switch it up between my own sites, dating links, a similar site etc. This was the gallery doesnt go down and nobody gets pissed at me.

I have a sponsor that currently owes me over 20k and all I have done is swap out root pages to similar niche sites. All of my galleries are still active and that fucking sponsor is still making sales off me. I have recently come to realize that I will never see this money and I am thinking about just swapping the links and dealing with whatever happens when it happens. If they hit me with a dmca then i'll swap everything back while I work on 404'ing it.

This makes me really glad that 98% of the galleries and free sites I submit are for my own sites.

I 404 everything I can find on link lists, but I'm sure I have old free sites out there from 10 years ago that have defunct links on them, its just been so many years since I built anything but for a handful of sponsors other than my own sites, and they are all still active, it isn't worth the bother.

I do know I went and changed out a ton of links when pro adult went under, since I had promoted them heavily, and switched them to my other sites on other avs systems.

You can make URLs as generic as possible so if you have to drop a sponsor you can just replace one set of content for a very similar set of content and not upset the traffic.

I'm trying to wean myself off long, descriptive URLs partly for this reason.

I think I'd build a niche specific landing page. Do a search and replace and send that traffic to my landing page with multiple sites advertised on it. I'd leave up the content and take my chances too.

I'm a bit different since I do mostly blogs but I delete the posts and then 301 to the root or a similar page depending on how lazy I feel.

It's also why I always use at least 3 sponsors on a blog

honestly, switching out ads seems the best option, since many of mine are custom and i own the content..don't like using sponsor content...this is just another reason why not to..

do a brother a solid and write a tutorial on how to do that with co-location accounts. Do we have to install the rsynch client on our co-lo server or what?

I'm getting sick of manually updating freesites and pages with dead or untrustworthy sponsors. And I expect there will be many more sponsor deaths coming.

What Red Cherry said |thumb

I'm a Mac user and Macs are unix just like our servers are. Rsync is a command line unix tool.

It basically it does FTP but it's really fast and can be used to sync two directories or two entire servers. In my case my server and a local copy of it on my hard drive. I've automated all of the this using a crontab on my Mac.

Nothing to install on your server, or on a Mac for that matter. Not sure what is available for Windows users.

This is what the rsync command looks like that a crontab on my Mac runs each night.
To rsync it back,
But there is no need to use rsync at all. I use it because I prefer to work on a copy of my stuff instead of the original in case I mess up. Also because I prefer using Mac's visual tools like drag and drop and BBEdit.

You can also ssh into your server and use command line tools to do search and replace or delete.

sorry to hear that terry, thats just fucked and a lot of money

I been kind of lucky when weg went, that was a easy and replace ads and links

as far as content goes when a sponsor went out, I'd lean towards what UW said and use of careful thought on a case by case decision

Doesn't always make you 100% safe. My main sponsor is me, but my main adult business is selling the eBooks that I publish, so my links go direct to the payment processor's page. A few years back my processor decided that he no longer wanted to do adult goods, so I changed processor. In the long run this was a good thing because my new processor was more of a distributor than just a processor, and actually generates sales for me. But it meant I had to go through all my sites and change the fucking links.

I picked "Do a search and replace of your sponsor code" though with the first and only time this has happened before I deleted the blog posts. I think I will replace the code next time.

What is an idiot proof way to replace affiliate links? Can I redirect affiliate links to a 404 page using .htaccess?

Using SSH just seems a bit tricky

Most sites I set up use a .php redirect for each sponsor, so if one dicks me around I can just change 1 link and at least the traffic is going somewhere productive.

Same with .404 .. just use a master .php redirect and then you can change it around with ease.

Changing around dozens or hundreds of site's links would drive me mad.