Please don't tell me your advocating using affiliates in place of an ad network like AdSense. While on the surface it makes sense, and if you're lucky you'll find great affiliate programs, but there's an equally, some would say much dirtier side to affiliate programs.

Success is the key to how your relationships go. Get too successful and chances are the company you have an affiliate agreement with will get tired of paying out large sums to you (sound familiar?) They will either kill your relationship outright, or replicate your business model first and then kill your relationship once it's taken hold.

Also, other affiliates will do whatever they can to sabotage your efforts.

The best defense to all of these shenanigans is diversification and direct ad sales.

Google may or may not screw you on AdSense, and your affiliate "partner" may or may not to the same. They key is to be ready and have an alternative waiting in the wings for when it happens (and trust me it will if you have success)

It sounds like you don't have much experience with being an affiliate.

An affiliate is a "marketer on commission". Much like a salesman on commission.

>Get too successful and chances are the company you have an affiliate agreement with will get tired of paying out large sums to you (sound familiar?) They will either kill your relationship outright, or replicate your business model first and then kill your relationship once it's taken hold.

This is like saying if a salesman gets too successful at his company, they will fire him and make the sales themselves.

I've never heard of this happening, and it would be idiotic to do. A company gets essentially free money from their affiliates. They take no risk and get marketers that are much smarter than the ones that are on the job market working for them. This is a dream for pretty much every company. Even Google has affiliate programs.

>Also, other affiliates will do whatever they can to sabotage your efforts.

This is like saying your fellow salesmen will sabotage your efforts.

Nope. Remember, people aren't against you, they are for themselves. Affiliates WILL copy what you are doing if you're successful, but that happens in sales as well. And who cares? The best will still be the best because they will come up with better things.

But this is irrelevant, because if you do what the parent comment says, they can't copy you unless they take control of your site.

>and trust me it will if you have success

Why should I trust you? What experience do you have? It sounds like you're exaggerating something you read somewhere.

Well, I'd agree with the competition and replication. But that's the nature of business. Once you get good enough, others will use your work as an inspiration to outperform you or delete you out of the equation.

Outside of that, I never reached the volume where I had to worry about the pay outs myself.

But I have worked for companies that HAVE reached a VERY high volume (read: millions in affiliate sales) and they had no problem either, as long as a contract was signed outside of the regular affiliate program to control traffic, cost, etc. I think that's the only reasonable thing you can do: have a direct partnership with another company once the volume reaches a critical mass.

Having an alternative is, of course, a must-have. Or rather, like you said, diversification. Having multiple affiliates, multiple working relationships.

I don't agree with you on direct ad sales. It doesn't mitigate anything. It's the same deal as the rest of the advertising world, nothing special about it.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, I was fully expecting to have my comment skewered. Multiple, direct relationships with advertisers seems to be the key to long term success. Unfortunately for the "small guy" that doesn't come until you're beyond a certain traffic threshold leaving most to swim the troubled waters of AdSense and the like.

Your Digital Ocean link doesn't work, the double // after the domain seems to be the problem.

The Digital Ocean ad on your site is a faulty link that 404s

Thanks! I just added it, simple typo :)

is a site called AntiAnus safe for me to view at work?

It's a j, not an i. A bit tough to tell with the underline there.

The link reads ANTJANUS, not ANTIANUS.

It's AntJanus.