Bad Affiliate Programs

Status
Not open for further replies.

dubbs

Banned
Mar 7, 2007
6
0
0
costfreehost.com
1) Questseek (questseek.com) owes me over $100 and has not paid me even though I made the money months ago. The emails I sent on numerous occasions all bounced back. Questseeks's email addresses do not exist. Questseek is a scam.


2) Adverex (adverex.com) changed or lost my password and does not answer my emails. They do not provide a way to reset my password. I have no idea how much they owe me.


3) PayPerPost (payperpost.com) -- low pay. They have made accounting mistakes in which they assigned the sales from one affiliate's account to someone else's account. They say they have corrected those mistakes/links.


4) Miva opened a new pay-per-click beta service that will run both contextual and inline ads, but when you sign up, you provide a lot of personal information, and then (given what I have witnessed) Miva often immediately tells you, "The account does not meet our qualification criteria."

I guess Miva is going to collect a lot of bogus information, because anyone giving them a tax id right off the bat should think twice. In the past I have seen spyware detectors (anti-spyware software) block pages that contain Miva ads. That may not be Miva's fault, but it happened.


5) MoneyForTrying (moneyfortrying.com) has been down for quite awhile now, and its "home page" shows the message, "so you don't want to pay me because the traffic i sent was 100% ukranian? i sent the traffic, i dont care if it wasnt 'mostly english speaking' traffic you pay me my $9,204 and ill give you your mysql database and website files back -buchkov p.s. lol @ your server."

But I don't believe it was written by a Ukrainian: the English is too good. I think the webmaster simply took off without paying his affiliates.

I wrote the domain registrar, and they said they can't do anything about it.


6) Snap Dollars (snapdollars.com) has accounting problems, posts conflicting information on its site (and then does not update and correct that information), pays poorly (if at all), and often ignores emails and support questions.


7) Freehostinn (freehostinn.com) Up until March 5, 2007, Dataracks.net hosted the free web-hosting site Freehostinn.com. But yesterday, Freehostinn announced that it was discontinuing its services. Freehostinn did not offer to pay its affiliates the referral commissions they had recently earned (10 cents per referral to their free hosting plan). In fact Freehostinn owes me $21.40, and I can only conclude that Freehostinn was a scam from its very inception.

Freehostinn.com was using its free web-hosting service to refer customers to Hostgator.com and to Dataracks.net. Freehostinn offered free web-hosting accounts and then (for a fee) offered its customers paid upgrades to Hostgator hosting accounts (Hostgator is not free). Obviously both Hostgator and Dataracks should choose their affiliates and customers more wisely. Freehostinn made money from referrals and its business practices reflect badly on Hostgator and Dataracks. And it seems that both Hostgator and Dataracks made money from Freehostinn's duplicity.
 


Yeah, cheers for sharing that. It's good to hear of people's experiences with these companies - be them good or bad!
 
My site had a few hoodia product offers we were pushing that paid $30-$35 a lead. I took it upon myself to test many of the offers, so I tried the hoodia dealio and we never got paid. Now hoodia anything is banned from my site.

Even worse, it was difficult to complain to the affiliate network, as the merchant never sent an order confirmation email, invoice, or a sales receipt with the shipment. The offer I tried took credit cards, but another one wanted a bank account routing number for direct withdrawals. That really sucks balls.

Worst of all I have my hoodia now, and the stuff actually makes me hungrier.
 
I'll add two to the list...


1- CommissionJunction - Owes me over $140,000 in commissions from 2005-2006 from mortgage lead merchants that claimed "fraud" leads 30 days AFTER they were submitted.

2- PartnerWeekly - Owes me over $45,000 from just last month. Very long story, but in short, they were only willing to pay me a shitty $200 to recoup my costs (which were around $16,000 total), and then tried to recruit me away from the ad network I went through, which is a shady thing to do too. Not to mention they wanted me to promote a different site for them after I was told I wouldn't be getting paid from them. This is only for their Cash Advance/Payday Loan vertical. Their mortgage network is actually very good.

Just goes to show you, that no matter how big or small of an affiliate you are, there is always room to be fucked over. The bigger you are, the harder of a hit you are going to take. Ah well. This is the game we play. This is also why I am creating a service for affiliates to band together so that if and when a network or merchant tries to fuck someone over, they will be boycotted until the affiliate is paid out -- but only if the affiliate is not at fault.
 
This is also why I am creating a service for affiliates to band together so that if and when a network or merchant tries to fuck someone over, they will be boycotted until the affiliate is paid out -- but only if the affiliate is not at fault.

Like a trade union for affiliates?

Great plan but I'm not sure if a socialist idea like that would work in the cut-throat capitalist world of affiliate marketing.

Power to the People!
 
Like a trade union for affiliates?

Great plan but I'm not sure if a socialist idea like that would work in the cut-throat capitalist world of affiliate marketing.

Power to the People!

It's been an idea in the works for a while now. Don't expect it to come out very soon. I have way too much to fulfill first before this. But sometime soon I'll get around to it, and give the networks and merchants a second chance to pay up or lose a shit ton of business.
 
Damn Jon that's 185 grand lol.. that shit is nutz.. I'm starting to feel really really really tiny lol.. well I hope that shit comes back to you.. and yeah definitely keep this thread open and keep adding them.. it will help noobs.. like me avoid getting invovled with shady ass companies
 
It's been an idea in the works for a while now. Don't expect it to come out very soon. I have way too much to fulfill first before this. But sometime soon I'll get around to it, and give the networks and merchants a second chance to pay up or lose a shit ton of business.

Sounds interesting....!
 
Awesome thread.

While I'm not sure it's a BAD/SCAM affiliate network, I joined Leader Markets a while back and was not happy with them at all. I sent them several e-mails which they never answered. I stopped promoting their offers after I realized they were never going to reply to my simple e-mails. Any company that can't answer a few basic questions is no good in my opinion. It shows they don't give a fuck about their affiliates.

On the opposite side of the scale, I'd like to point out that the absolute BEST affiliate network I've worked with so far is NeverBlueAds. Great offers. Great AMs. They're extremely helpful and answer e-mails witihin hours. I've had the most conversions with these guys due to the excellent help and support from my AM. Anyone looking for a great affiliate network, you should check NeverBlueAds out. I highly recommend them.
 
I'll add two to the list...


1- CommissionJunction - Owes me over $140,000 in commissions from 2005-2006 from mortgage lead merchants that claimed "fraud" leads 30 days AFTER they were submitted.

That same shit happened to me with a credit solutions company for like 4k in March/April.

I polled my subscribers and over 50% said the motherfuckers had called them on the phone. I showed the responses to cj, but they didn't do shit except pay me 7 days late on my other promotions.

Makes it real hard to want to push their advertisers anymore.
 
so clickbank isnt in this list as a bad affilate?
i didnt like anything about them!
and havent seen anything good about em!

and i know people including my brother got a virus on his pc from a clickbank link!
i know they dont have much control of that kind of ish but still sucks!
and they promote lots of warez and illegal products!
 
Jon, thanks for the tip on Partner Weekly - I was looking at reactivating my account with them to try some CA campaigns compared to the ones I run now, but if they screwed you I'm not going to support them...most of that vertical is sending the the same few lenders anyway, so maybe it wasn't worth switching over.
 
..and they promote lots of warez and illegal products!

It's more the buy-my-ebook-and-i'll-get-you-to-sell-my-ebook type of shit that makes it clickwank.com (did that domain sell?)

There does seem to be some good products on clickbank - software, away from the marketing sector - but you have to wade through a lot of shit to find them!

Nothing warez there and probably not illegal though.... warez (and related ....z wordz) are all about making stuff available for free isn't it? Maybe illegal but not necessarily immoral.

I think clickbank is in some ways the opposite - it's encouraging people to create more and more (mostly) useless products and sell them, whereas the warez/crack ethos is more about finding the best products and using your skills to make them available for free.

I know which one I prefer.
 
Has anyone had any luck with Miva?

as per buying their traffic (Miva USA)... at one point I make quite a bit from their cheap traffic, now their traffic is just crap, same thing for goclick which was always crap..(for me anyway)
Miva UK, they seemed ok for traffic quality but they had a 10 UK pence minimun bid which made them 20 times dearer than Google.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.