Just got this from Ruben

Well, how could I promote the program further if there will always be some sort of "we don't like you , we'll terminate your account"?

I removed all my posts with femjoy today and I really hope that others do the same...

If 2014 will be hard year in adult it is because sponsors are doing the wrong moves. I personally submit galleries, sell traffic, buy traffic from google and I'm doing quite fine , not complaining.
It's much easier to sit in front of the PC posting pics and doing light work that working in offline business - I have so I know.

Sponsors like femjoy who think that chaching only the big fishes is what matters really got it wrong - I had this experience with my offline business.
You will remove all your small affiliates and when the big guys decided to promote someone else and put Femjoy aside then let's see who will make the sales!

My lack of sales had much to do with a long dry spell of quality traffic that has finally broken. So, my plan is to stay the course. At least until I hear horror stories about rebills being prematurely cut off. Then I walk the plank.

Well I guess that answers my question about affiliates not getting paid for rebills if one does not have X number of sales within X number of days. Now if we could only find out the value of both X's.

maybe they should send this guy to manner school, never seen anyone in affiliate management be so abrasive, especially for someone who doesn't even seem to know the basics of how ccbill works

don't they get if they keep this up, not much will be left of their reputation

You know what, in total over the past 14 months I've sent a healthy amount of sales to them, high nnn. These are split across probably 40 or 5 accounts that I've bought over the years.

I know only too well how easy it is for sites to lose out in the SERPS etc and sales go to shit, so if that happens tomorrow then they are going to cut me off in 6 months time?

Fuck that shit, time to phase them out and fill some spots with sponsors that know what they are doing.

I think this would offend people less if some smarts were used, and not such a blanket rule as conversion ratio

you have to take into account the type of traffic it is & resources it uses:
tubes gives more content away than picture galleries
embedded vs self hosted when it comes to resources
picture galleries give more away than sites just posting a cover or posts on a pinboard
even less content is given away if it's just a text link, for instance on a model profile that lists all the sites the model posed for

in those last two cases even if the conversion is shitty, it didn't over expose your content

again why not look at referrer stats and target domains that are converting badly or cost you resources instead of targeting a whole affiliate account

I get that it's tough times for paysites, but I think more targeted solutions are better & of course take down pirated content

Let me come to Ruben's defense on this point (still can't stand the guy & hope never to be contacted by him again), this is what he wrote me

so I guess they block your ccbill id cookie, while still keeping your account active?

however this brings up an interesting point in general: can sponsors keep a ccbill account active, but block you specific ID, would you as an affiliate have any way of knowing this? And do we know sponsors aren't doing this as we speak? I'm not saying anyone is doing this, I'm just asking the question if it's possible, going of what Ruben wrote to me

Would you say your site(s) is perfect and does not require any changes for the next 20 years?

The moment you say your site does not need work, that's the moment your competitors swoop in and kill you. This is the internet - you don't stop optimizing. That's what we are saying to our affiliates. If you were an affiliate of ours, you would receive our newsletters where we announce changes and improvements on a regular basis. We encourage our affiliates to do the same.

I understand your opinion jmc. Because you are not one of our affiliates, you are only getting one side of this conversation right?

Over the past year, I've sent out dozens of emails to struggling affiliates, asking them how we could help. I've sent a few newsletters too. Only about 3 affiliates replied. The three who have replied, I took the time to go over their websites to make suggestions on how to make improvements that would not only affect their promotions to us, but their business overall. We've been very open to struggling affiliates. They were invited to contact us at any time.

A lot of affiliates promote multiple programs, or doing this part-time, and may not have the resources to devote to making the necessary improvements. We understand that.

Yes, sponsors can suspend or block your account of new sales. We do it when affiliates violate our terms or do something really bad like abuse our trademarks.

Yes, sponsors are notified that their account has been blocked from future sales, unless the sponsor is managing with their own software. Then it is up to the sponsors to dutifully notify the affiliates.

thanks for the answer Michael :thumbsup was getting nightmares of sponsors turning it on and off and affiliates not being notified about this. reminded me of that situation a few years back where a couple of sponsors limited the amount of rebills for affiliates, while claiming they were unlimited, since then I always double check in ccbill program info

According to Ruben's email above, it appears it is also done if an affiliate does not improve their sales right? It would be helpful to your program and affiliates if affiliates knew what level of sales activity they needed to maintain in order to prevent new sales from being blocked.

I assume you mean affiliates are notified, if so good to know.

I think Femjoy does not want to bring no content so they don't want to over expose the very old one :))) . This way surfers will think that everything is brand new :)))

Over the past year, I've sent out dozens of emails to struggling affiliates, asking them how we could help. I've sent a few newsletters too. Only about 3 affiliates replied. The three who have replied, I took the time to go over their websites to make suggestions on how to make improvements that would not only affect their promotions to us, but their business overall. We've been very open to struggling affiliates. They were invited to contact us at any time.

A lot of affiliates promote multiple programs, or doing this part-time, and may not have the resources to devote to making the necessary improvements. We understand that.[/QUOTE]

MICHAEL please give me your email . I want to contact you so I can show you my site and see what would you improve in respect to promoting Femjoy program.

It would not bother me to make new sales so let's give this a try.

I don't want to contact Ruben because he's like a full-of-crap politician . Was he in some sort of governmental institution before coming to Femjoy? His language sure sound like a public employee.

michael [at] femjoy.com

Wow. Talk about taking to the internet to scream "STAY AWAY FROM OUR SHITTY PROGRAM!"

I'm having a real WTF moment right now.

Allow me to amplify on that.

I just checked my CCbill. I have (or maybe "had", who knows?) a Femjoy account, that dates to 2007. Looks like I've made 15 sales with them and had 60 rebills, the last of which died in 2011. I haven't actively promoted them in years. My all time conversion ratio with them is around 1:4300 on about 65k clicks. In the last calendar year I've sent them around 4k clicks from the ancient blog posts, no sales. Perhaps I'm due for a sale in 2014?

So, here's the unique twist. I signed up via CCbill, back in the day, but I have no record of ever having signed up for the separate Joycash account that harvests the email address they are now using to communicate with underperforming webmasters. They've got no way to email me. Looking at the Wayback Machine, there's no record that the Joycash site even existed before 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cash.femjoy.com. And if you look at the 2008 version of the site it's not clear whether there was a signup separate from your CCBill account back then; it looks like there was not. (But in those days, the Wayback Machine didn't always capture scripts properly, so it's hard to be sure.)

I certainly haven't sent a sale in the last six months, and I certainly haven't heard from Rueben. (Not his fault, he doesn't have my email.) Has FemJoy now set some sort of flag on my account that lets them silently steal my traffic but refuses to credit me for sales? There's nothing that shows in my CCbill account, but it sounds like perhaps they aren't telling CCbill when they do this. Which is pretty shitty if true. There *is* a mechanism for deactivating an affiliate account in a way that shows up in the affiliate's CCbill account, but it doesn't sound like that's what they are doing. (At least that would be honest.)

There's no reason for them not to happily accept my little trickle of ancient blog post traffic and credit me for sales if and when they happen. Costs them nothing, costs me nothing, is good business all around. And even today, if I saw a Femjoy picture on a Tumblr somewhere and liked it, my reflex (before reading this thread) would have been to reblog it with an affiliate link on one of my many blogs. I do this near-daily, using any of dozens of almost-moribund affiliate programs. It generates no great wealth but it keeps the lights on. Where's the harm in that?

But what this thread and the quoted emails has done is destroyed all trust. Now, I'm not clear whether my account is being properly credited, so why would I ever trust this sponsor enough to promote them in future? They've made it very clear that they don't value the fundamental premise of the revshare affiliate bargain, which is that links and traffic will be credited (and rebills paid) for as long as the affiliate promotion and/or the program itself might last. A program owner who does not understand and honor that bargain is worthless to affiliates.

Trust is the most precious commodity an affiliate program owner can have with his affiliates. It's easily destroyed. ANY email threatening to terminate an affiliate account that has an old installed base of promotional material is destructive of that trust, it doesn't matter what the reason might be. And Michael's posts here have done NOTHING to restore that trust. Simplest translation of "This is a management decision" is "our bosses are crooks who have decided not to honor the traffic from your old promotional efforts." There's no way to repair that disclosure once it's out there.

If I built a bunch of promotional materials in 2008, those work for both of us, forever. A sponsor who even HINTS at the possibility that they might come along later and say "sorry, if you're not working hard for us this week, we won't honor your old work" is a sponsor whom nobody should promote. And now that it appears they may be doing this without even notifying the oldest affiliates, for whom they've never had emails? As I said, it destroys the necessary trust. There are plenty of sponsors out there who are happy to have (and credit) the traffic from my ancient blog posts.

I agree with what you mentioned above.

The affiliate works very hard one year producing a few sales and the next year for whatever reason, illness, travelling, etc, you can not work any longer for Femjoy or can only work part time and they go and close your account and all your work, links, galleries are suddenly gone up in smoke.

If you no longer make sales it might not seem a huge amount, but that is not the point, traffic could rebound, sales can happen even with small traffic and a single customer with rebills can be as much as $500 to you, you would lose thousands of dollars in sales over the years.

You pay for your own domains, hosting and everything. Femjoy will not insure you or pay any kind of holidays or benefit other than a percentage of any sale you make, and now they come along as if you were a Femjoy employee that costs them lots of money and tell you to work harder, full time and better or you are out of the door.

I think that smaller bloggers know what to do, and Femjoy is fine with that. The decisive question will be if the big whale sites are going to agree with Femjoy's new terms and conditions. I can also see that if Femjoy loses half their affiliates, it will be easier to make sales for the remaining, but the risk of being kicked out for not selling is simply too high and Femjoy isn't going to be found by the surfers that easily.

Email sent

Ok so I've sent en email to Michael . I will wait for his feedback , try to follow his possible advice (if any) and send maybe 15k of traffic over a period of a month. See what happens

What happens to me is a brief shift in search engine results sending a blast of traffic to a seven-year-old blog post. It usually only lasts a few days, but in the aggregate these events are responsible for a good proportion of my sales. Having a program dump me because I'm not sending steady sales is destructive and hurts both of us.

This is related to Met-Art but I will post it here because other webmasters looking for alternatives should know that Met-Art is accepting Bitcoins, I just saw it today.

I don't see any likehood that affiliates are going to get credited for customers paying in Bitcoins since CCBill does not manage Bitcoin payments. It is not a huge worry because few people use Bitcoins at the moment, but it makes you think about how many ways there are for affiliates to get screwed.

I spotted another sponsor I had links to moving CCBill as backup billing agent , this means that all billings that are not rejected will not be credited to the affiliate. Of course I deleted the few links and photos I had to that sponsor, but this is just wasting my time on them.

I think that the affiliate business model is totally dead in adult. This is not worth it, you get up one day and the rules of the game have changed, the last three years work can all be gone just like that, there is nothing you can do if a sponsor changes the rules of the game. We are lucky enough if they play dirty tricks the legal way, if they don't do it legal it can not be seen.

Which sponsor? This is why I prefer sponsors that have their own affiliate program and tracking program rather than CCbill...

Femjoy Michael, there is a Private Message in your Inbox if you haven't already read it.

agree, downside there is sometimes higher minimum payouts, which weren't a problem a few years back, but now

BUT most importantly, no guarantee that you'll see your payout, it never really used to be a big problem, but the amount of time I had to waste this past year on actually getting my money is incredible and yes some fuckers still owe me money and I have no hope of ever seeing it

but still most sponsors keep saying how great things are going, best year ever and that crap, but at the same time affiliates are being screwed left and right, and payouts don't seem to arrives in affiliate's bank accounts

so actually I'm looking to promote more ccbill & epoch programs again, because I know I'll get the money. NATS run big programs will pay me out, but the conversions are shit and with smaller nats programs I have no guarantee of a payout

It's becoming very popular for these bro sponsors to shit on small and medium sized affiliates. Fuck it. Take the hint. Stay away from them. Promote someone else. If there are no viable choices left then promote something else. But don't keep banging your head against the wall with people like this who will screw you over. You'll never get ahead.

Excellent idea, please see sig :upsidedow

I promote only the big programs even though they are somehow over saturated but at least I know they'll pay... I thought Femjoy was among those type of programs but I must have been wrong...

they pay, they are just mad about low sales and they didnt realized its industry wide, so they push hard to get a buck more ...

They are not a big brand, they care called Teendreams, it says on their billing page (100% secured transaction - Billed as www .purewebpower.net).

Teendreams = dream-cash, but they run a NATS program (I remember a few years ago, you could choose to use nats or ccbill links) how do you know they're not awarding money to affiliates if that first biller is used?

Because they are not CCBill?

I think met-art metioned it was credited to affiliates. They use bitpay.com like everyone else and this one pays in dollars to the program; it is enough to tell ccbill how much $$ to add to payouts with some integration which sure met-art done.

But as you said, bitcoin sales are a joke in %, maybe in 2020 will be nice % but I would say not shortly.

but if you use NATS links, you should get your cut, no matter which biller they use

OK, well it seems I got this wrong, sorry.

Signed up under you for Reboot Cash :thumbsup

Thank you, I appreciate that, I have sold a few of their memberships and I hope you will have the same luck.

Yes, we've been accepting Bitcoin for a good while. It was announced in this thread.

CCBill also does not manage the cam payouts that we issue to affiliates, but we still make them. :) Unfortunately, we have no way of itemizing them, but they do show up in the total. If we did not have the ability to track them, affiliate traffic wouldn't go to join forms with that payout option.

You are correct, thank you. :)

http://csdpcorp.com/Portals/3/Blog%20Pics/respect.jpg
John B.Root

hey thats great