Markus at PlentyofFish says:
I’m at affiliate summit this week, its amazing that the only other dating site here is match.com There are 3,500 affiliates here and dating sites are paying them 10’s of millions of dollars. The dating industry is kind of backwards why wouldn’t more dating sites attend an event where people who are responsible for such a massive part of their revenues attend ?
At any rate the conference has been a huge success for us, we met thousands of affiliates many of which buys ads on our platform. What other marketing conferences are worth attending? The only other conference we are going to attend the next few months will be ad tech.
Of those 3,500 affiliates, it seems there are only a handful who that aren’t scammy, spammy or simply don’t perform well. Sure top 10 dating sites and adult/casual sites make a boatload of money of affiliates, but for the rest of the dating industry, the reality is that so many of those leads are bogus, it’s a tangled web that most dating sites don’t bother unraveling. Send me traffic, if I make money I don’t’ care how it got to my site, seems to be the prevailing mindset.
I can’t believe that dating review sites are still pimping out American Singles, and a few other sites. The dating affiliate market needs to catch up and more dating sites need solid affiliate programs. Feels like the sector is stuck in 2005.
Funny that I got an email from Shoemoney while writing this.
I did a project this summer to build up an affiliate network, the most absolutely miserable project I’ve ever done. Talking to a bunch of sleazbags operators shucking crap traffic while trying to figure out the real deal behind their offers was a complete night. The few people who are expert affiliates keep their mouths shut and those who talk the loudest tend to underperform, at least in my experience.
POF will not be at iDate next week. That’s another big site not attending this year.
