I would rather not write posts on such a negative topic, but the state of the Adult web isn’t looking so hot lately. There’s an interesting thread over at insidewebmastering.com that is list of dead programs that everyone should probably check out.

This summer, I noticed a dramatic decrease in clicks and sales to some of the programs I’m currently sending a majority of my traffic to. I naturally attributed it to this shitty economy, and the time of year. Actually, I do pretty well during the summer despite rumors of a so called “Summer Slowdown”. So, my gut is telling me something’s wrong.

A friend sent a link to a pretty cool site where you can find an extensive list of new and interesting programs to promote, broken down by niche, and various other factors called signbucksdaily.com.

I lost this bookmark, and did a search for it which returned a page i thought looked interesting that I was previously unaware of. Their Blacklist page.

Scanning over it, I notice about six programs on here that I am signed up with. I think it’s weird that four of these programs on their blacklist are four of my best converting programs, with the best ratios, but oddly, receiving the least amount of clicks.

This doesn’t make sense considering how much traffic they should be receiving. I decided to investigate further.

I log into the program that has the best ratios out of all of them, then I check traffic stats for the best converting site. Ok, the ratio for this specific site is an amazing 1:65 on MGP traffic. This sale was made from the very first gallery I submitted for this site. What’s weird is, I notice that I have submitted a total of five galleries promoting this site, and stats are only showing clicks for the first gallery. There have been a total of zero total clicks for the other four galleries. This makes absolutely no sense considering that all five galleries have been submitted to the same exact place.

I contact their support on ICQ telling them that I think there’s a problem. This person proceeds to tell me to email their support, so I do. A bit later, I hear back from support, and this person tells me it looks like some of my links are using the “Default” Nats linking code, and asks me what page generated these links for me. I tell him where I got the links…from the inside of your Webmaster’s Area.

I then login again to check things out, and all of a sudden, all of my links codes are magically fixed. Problem is, these galleries are already out there floating around, with incorrect affiliate codes. And I have to manually check each one to see what’s correct, and what’s broken.

I then email support again asking them to reimburse me for lost sales generated by this code. It’s a code not tied to my account, but it’s still a code. It should still be tracking sales…I haven’t heard back from them yet…what a surprise.

As I am manually going through everything, I start seeing something that all these sites have in common. They all are using the default Nats code that will look something like this:

http://secure.whateversite.com/track/MDowOjI/

The problem lies with the” “/MDowOjI/”

This is the default Nats link code, extension, sub-directory, whatever you want to call it. Thing is, the actual link code that should be in its place, looks very similar to that. So at first glance, you naturally assume that it is correct.

Now I decide to take a look at another program on the SBD blacklist that I am now questioning. And god dammit, can you guess what I found?! That’s correct, the auto-generated  link codes in this program’s free hosted gallery system are also using the same /MDowOjI/ default Nats code. Holy shit! What a surprise!

So, I’ve discovered that two out of six (actually one out of six now, but…) of the sites on this blacklist are doing exactly what SBD is calling them out on. And apparently, it’s a known issue because I am not the first person to discover this. And because they know it’s happening, isn’t it convenient for them that they only fix the bug if you point it out to them? I have tried contacting the second site, but have not heard back from them either.

The reason why I’m writing this, and calling it deceptive, is because there’s a little trick being played on affiliates here. When you log into your account, and go to your FHG list, the first few galleries for each site has your correct linking codes in them. When you dig a little deeper into later galleries in the list, you discover that your link codes magically change to the default Nats “/MDowOjI/” link code, which doesn’t count clicks or give you credit for any sales you generate.

I wonder how many affiliates this is happening to? How many of us log into our accounts, and quickly do a massive dump of all of the galleries in these lists, with out checking each and every link code, on each and every gallery? How many sales are being lost to this?

To consider this a technical glitch is just plain bullshit. Keep an eye out for /MDowOjI/

Also, please share your experiences about anything similar so we all know who to look out for.