AzoogleAds Makes Good on New Referral Terms
It didn’t take long for AzoogleAds to get in contact with me, right after I my “New AzoogleAds Referral Terms Screw Affiliates” post went live. Though I was not first to break the news on the new terms and conditions on the changes to their referral program, I have not seen any updates from other blogs since. Today we will look over their term changes again and why AzoogleAds say it was a necessary change for them.
I first talked with Mitch from AzoogleAds about an hour after the post went live. Mitch wanted to make it clear to me that they are still “dedicated to the long term and wants to put the right measures in place” and that “there are custom programs in place for people like u, these changes were more to weed out the bad players who were taking advantage of the program“.
Later that night I was also contacted by AzoogleAds co-Founder Alex Zhardanovsky. Unfortunately, at the time I wasn’t available, so I got to talk with Alex this morning. Like Mitch, Alex just wanted to clear everything up and try to set things straight. A few minutes before talking with Alex, he stopped by the blog and posted a comment response himself:
After talking with Alex and Mitch, I can understand their situation, and I pointed out to that the reason why everyone was so steamed about their announcement, was because their was not listed justification or reasoning behind the change. If you are working at a job, then the boss comes over and hands you a letter stating “You will no longer receive a raise or any bonus”… you would flip out too.
AzoogleAds will make exceptions for their new affiliate referral program on a personal basis, as the new terms are in effect so they basically don’t have to monitor every account for referral fraudulence. Apparently there was a big amount of money of affiliates within the networks that were being referred by “family” or “friends”, then 2% of their earnings were just coming in as gravy, while cutting into AzoogleAds’ margins.
I will continue to list AzoogleAds program and offers on the blog, as they have made the effort to correct things on their end for deserving referral sites. If you are currently sending referrals to AzoogleAds, I would contact them personally to discuss your situation and see what they can do for you. Once again, this fiasco has shown the power of blogging and communication. While some readers were angry that I removed AzoogleAds from the blog, simply because you thought it would be a loss of revenue for me, you are wrong. My referrals and revenue sources from AzoogleAds are minimal and I made the decision to remove their links because at the time, new terms were put in place with no explanations or reasoning. With so many networks and revenue sources available, I will not tolerate drastic changes without reasoning, and neither should you.
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This almost makes it sound worse. People try to optimize income. That is the name of the game. That is why people check all affiliate programs for offers to get the one that converts/pays out the best. Seems like a few ebooks will have to be rewritten/updated for this change. I guess they are waiting to cash in on the IPO and shedding the fat before hand.
I would venture a guess that referring yourself was always against the terms, so now they're just enforcing the rules a bit more. Sounds fair to me. 🙂
They can explain all they want. They fact is those terms suck bad for affiliates. Bottom line. The problem with people signing up as their sister is not the affiliates problem. That's Azoogle's problem, not mine. But Azoogle has just passed that problem on to the affiliate so they don't have to deal with it.
Azoogle sucks!
https://www.wealthstore.com
I wonder if your previos post about them had anything to do with them trying to make amends?;)
Wow, now mentors that offered help to their referrals have stopped doing so. Thank you Azoogle!
I don't get what Alex is saying. If you refer your sister and you set up the account for her, you still have to make money within that account to make the 2% referral commission. If someone makes up say 1000 "fake" accounts they are still going to have to make money in all those accounts in order to generate the 2% kickback. If you can some how manage 1000 accounts and make good money on all of them you should be rewarded the aggregate 2% of each account, cause man that's one hard working person.
The bigger problem is if an affiliate has to go to all this trouble just to make an extra 2% what does this say about Azoogle's payouts and more importantly about their communication with their affiliates?
More over, the $1000 threshold is a good threshold, but cutting the lifetime commissions down to 6 months is a little harsh. A year or tow years would be more acceptable, since most newbies don't start earning a lot till their 6 months in anyway.
Zac, you don't have to pretend like you are ok with the supposed changes just because they contacted you ;). Although their reasoning behind it is understandable their method isn't as much. How about just make it painfully obvious that it is against the terms to refer yourself and anyone suspected of it will be reviewed and all earnings held and their account banned once found out. I'm sure it would be a pain, and they would have to babysit still but that is how it goes.
I very much doubt that adding the 1k threshold will stop those that like to take advantage of things and if that is all that is done then they know what it takes to get past it.
But in the mean time, all the actual good affiliates get penalized and have to jump through hoops and be "approved" to be able to earn commissions on referrals.
Reminds me of how much I hate when video game companies would put super crazy copyright protection that the pirates would hack in days anyway and the only ones that ended up having to deal with the frustration were the real customers.
I always thought it was better to take care of your honest and loyal customers first and deal with those that aren't on an individual bases, rather than the other way around.
I'm still tasting various networks to see which flow I like best but this definitely makes me want to concentrate on the ones that make it easy to promote and recommend.
PS also, how does dropping it down to 6 months downline stop those "smart" people that seem to be making azoogle go this route?
Of course they can change their TOS as they wish and affiliate can decide to stay with them or not, it really feels like they are trying to come up with excuses after seeing the backlash.
Maybe i'm crazy but since when does azoogle owe anyone referral commissions? I mean, isn't their job to pay their affiliates for generating traffic on cpa offers? If they dont want to have referral publishers anymore, let them be the ones to make this decision!? They obviously have way more publishers than they want, so why not spend the money more effectively. If I were running their business, I would do the same thing. Sure some people might get pissed off and blog about it, then they'll forget about it and move on. Theyre still the biggest network out there and thousands of affiliates still work with them, nothing changes for affiliates, especially if they went out of their way to accomodate big referrers like zac.