How do you know if a sponsor is shaving you?
1) Schroedinger's leads: the number of signups and leads on your panel change according to who is looking. For example, you login at 3 am and you see you made 5 signups that day on a promotion that pays $50 per signup. You did great. Later on the same day, say, at 2 pm you notice where it previously said 5 signups, there is only 1 signup, or none at all. So you contact the sponsor to ask what happened and they say they don't see any signups on their end, you must be mistaken. Are you sure it wasn't a different offer you were looking at before? Often the sponsor that shaves you like this will do so over and over so by the end of it you have absolutely no doubt in your mind of what was going on. Why they shave like this? They trust you aren't looking at your panel many times a day because most affiliates don't look.
2) Honeymoon Phase: a sleazy sponsor that knows how to rob you doesn't consider your earnings as etched in stone, they think of your earnings more like
incentives to get you to work for them doing what they want you to do. What I mean by this is they will typically credit you with a bunch of signups on your first week with them. You make up your mind about them "WOW! THIS REALLY WORKS!" it has much better conversion rate than whatever other program you have been using. So you promote them hardcore. Once they have locked you in you see a sharp decline in earnings, sometimes it completely dries up and you are left wondering if your traffic now sucks. If the offer sucks, or if they are robbing you. If a program performs 3x your expectations on the first week and then drops to almost nothing there is a high chance they are shaving you.
3) They promote immoral offers: someone who shaves their affiliates will typically have no issue robbing the traffic you send their way. This was the case with several offers on CrakRevenue, for instance, where they would pay you something crazy like $75 per credit card signup because the sponsor was charging the cards they got without permission from the supposed clients you were sending their way. If you see something like this and the CPA network has no qualms working with such type of offer you know they wouldn't really have any scruples shaving you either.
4) Gap between your usual numbers and what the sponsor reports as your earnings: if you know your traffic well and have been working on this for a long time you have an idea, an estimate of what to expect when you promote something. If the numbers you are being given are wildly different from what you expect, then there is a high chance something suspicious is going on with your earnings.
5) Because your traffic tells you: this will only work if you have a relationship with your audience, it doesn't work if you buy traffic in bulk or have google traffic or run a tube or something. If you are an influencer or you are a webmaster sending people who care, you might receive emails from them telling you "hey I signed up for this and that yesterday and it was awesome" or "it was shit" the key here is they signed up. So you go over to the panel. Do you have a signup that day for that offer? If you don't you might start looking more closely into the sponsor's panel, your reported earnings, etc as there is a chance you are also being taken for a ride.
Then there are other strategies that while upfront, are just as sleazy as the ones above.
For example... When Onlyfans opened they had an affiliate program. You got 5% lifetime revshare for every model you signed up with them. I thought there was a very nice earning potential here so I promoted this aggressively and over the course of a year or so got 20+ models to signup for Onlyfans. Most of them quit before 6 months had passed but I had 4 models earning a very nice and steady income. And I got a 5% slice of that. Until Onlyfans said they were closing their affiliate program RETROACTIVELY. Meaning, not only were they closing the affiliate program for the future, none of your "lifetime revshare" signups were going to be honored. They simply stole the accounts point blank. This is how you know a sponsor is SHIT and you should never work with them. I don't care what MFC or Onlyfans does in the future I will never promote anything they do because I learn my lessons the first time.
There you go.
What I'm talking about is more suitable for those with lower traffic i guess.
