Adult affiliate directory website started - requesting feedback

Marketing
1

hi there,

I am not sure if this is the most appropriate place to post this, so please do feel free to point me to a better place, or move my posting directly.

I am running a bunch of adult websites together with some friends, and we found it somewhat hard to find good affiliate programs and networks for such sites, especially given that Google AdSense is not really well suited for this type of business.

While there are obviously many lists on line, we were hoping to find a list completely driven and maintained by fellow webmasters who run the same sort of websites.

Ideally, we are hoping for people to vote for their affiliates of choice, so that the most popular networks get a corresponding rating.

Thus we have recently started a corresponding web site and would like to ask fellow webmasters to add their own recommendations to the site.

The whole site is based on the pligg CMS so it is fairly easy to get started.

Obviously, affiliate programs and networks can also register to add their own products and services there.

Depending on whether this turns out to work or not, we have a bunch of changes scheduled. At the moment everything is still “beta” so to speak, but there are more features going to be added if other people should also find this useful.

Obviously, this is only going to work if other people add their own recommendations to the site.

Even if your affiliate program or network of choice should already be listed, please do make sure to leave a vote, so that other webmasters can easily pick good partners.

We would appreciate your feedback regarding this, so that we can incorporate new feature requests and ideas step by step.

Please also leave a short note here if you would possibly be interested in helping reviewing entries submitted to the site, so that we can keep it clean off spam.

Please check out the site and give us your feedback

Thank you very much & all the best

-adultonly

2

Welcome to Sitepoint adultonly

I’d highly recommend adding the ability for your listings to specify what types of payout they offer. There’s always been a history of some shady affiliate owners to shave traffic referrals thus avoiding paying commissions, that’s why many adult webmasters prefer things like CCBill because it’s a 3rd party service that controls tracking and payouts. Of course NATS can be combined with CCBill but not all network owners use that facility and do their accounting and payouts in house, and it’s still a risky affair.

3

Thanks for your feedback, yes I actually share the concerns that you expressed - and to be honest pretty much most people told me exactly this, too.

Still, we set up a simple website to see if it works or not, let’s ay it’s an experiment. Spamming is probably only going to be a problem once such a site really becomes popular. Which I frankly don’t expect at all.

For the time being, we are planning to use this only among friends - we will see if it grows or not. Obviously, the resource requirements for such a site are fairly low and simple.

Regarding ref codes, that could be something that is explicitly removed during the review … on the other hand, that would be a good way for getting some good additions, so I am somewhat undecided. At the moment, I am considering to allow ref codes, maybe for a certain “grace period” and remove them after 6-12 months. I think that would possibly create quite an incentive for people to get involved, what do you think?

Affiliate programs/networks submitting themselves would actually not be a bad thing, obviously voting should be restricted to single accounts only.

Negative feedback for programs and networks that don’t pay properly is actually something that we were planning to encourage actively, after all that’s sort of the point: finding good and reliable partners, if payment is a problem, the whole program is a problem if you ask me.

I also think that this will only work with a certain minimum degree of organization, for the time being we have disabled all direct submissions and require admin approval.

You may want to have a look at www.adult-affiliate-directory.info
It’s all still fairly simple. We will see where things are going.

And yes, you are right, posting to adult webmaster forums would probably be a better idea :slight_smile:

Thanks again for your feedback!

4

That’s quite interesting idea there, I think that you would get more feedback on adult webmaster forums. Imho that system will not work good because people will want to spam their ref code links only, if you won’t allow it then you will get only stuffed by programs themselves, webmasters won’t share their best programs because such programs would get quickly oversaturated. You will get also plenty of negative comments on programs that don’t pay their affiliates or shave. But the whole concept is interesting and may work if well organized. Good luck anyway!

5

Thank you very much for your feedback, this is actually something that has been planned and that is in progress. The issue is obviously reviewing all affiliates.
We expect to be able to use the tagging system for specifying the types of payouts offered.
But it will probably take a while until we have gathered all the info and actually entered it into the DB. This is something where fellow webmasters could be of great help, simply by submitting their own recommended affiliates with a bunch of made up tags/attributes for describing the corresponding program or network.

I expect this to grow step by step. At the moment it is obviously still very basic, but the underlying CMS framework is flexible enough to support many things that we might come up with sooner or later.

I think the real issue at hand is that this is project that we just started fairly recently and our focus is obviously on our main business (i.e. our adult websites) and not really this directory of adult affiliates. So things are likely to only grow very slowly.

But in this regard, I think, the previously mentioned idea of posting to some of the more popular adult webmaster forums might be helpful.

Thanks again for your input, much appreciated!

  • adultonly