Bad Affiliate Programs
I do not recommend the following affiliate programs. They either do not pay you what they owe you or they do not pay you enough or nobody wants to pay for their services or they are unreliable or mean-spirited, or their addresses are fake (etc.). I do not understand why the search engines continue to index these scams.
1) Questseek (questseek.com) owes me over $100 and has not paid me even though I made the money months ago. The emails I sent on numerous occasions all bounced back. Questseeks's email addresses do not exist. Questseek is a scam.
2) Adverex (adverex.com) changed or lost my password and does not answer my emails. They do not provide a way to reset my password. I have no idea how much they owe me.
3) PayPerPost (http://www.payperpost.com) -- low pay. They have made accounting mistakes in which they assigned the sales from one affiliate's account to someone else's account. They say they have corrected those mistakes/links.
4) Miva opened a new pay-per-click beta service that will run both contextual and inline ads, but when you sign up, you provide a lot of personal information, and then (given what I have witnessed) Miva often immediately tells you, "The account does not meet our qualification criteria."
I guess Miva is going to collect a lot of bogus information, because anyone giving them a tax id right off the bat should think twice.
In the past I have seen spyware detectors (anti-spyware software) block pages that contain Miva ads. That may not be Miva's fault, but it happened.
5) MoneyForTrying (moneyfortrying.com) has been down for quite awhile now, and its "home page" shows the message, "so you don't want to pay me because the traffic i sent was 100% ukranian? i sent the traffic, i dont care if it wasnt 'mostly english speaking' traffic you pay me my $9,204 and ill give you your mysql database and website files back -buchkov p.s. lol @ your server."
But I don't believe it was written by a Ukrainian: the English is too good and the writer misspells Ukrainian. I think the webmaster simply took off without paying his affiliates.
I wrote the domain registrar, and they said they can't do anything about it.
6) Snap Dollars (snapdollars.com) has accounting problems, posts conflicting information on its site (and then does not update and correct that information), pays poorly (if at all), and often ignores emails and support questions.
7) WebMastersRoom (webmastersroom.com) recently changed the rules and kept at least some (if not all) of the money it owed for posts and referrals (they used to say that when you accumulated $5, you should PM the admin for payout). I emailed the admin about the changes and the money owed (small amounts add up when you have a lot of users). The admin was evasive and rude. (And I do not see why Google Adsense continues to advertise on his site.) In the forum, the admin claimed to have posted an announcement saying that pay-per-post was ending, but there is no evidence of that announcement now, and he should have emailed his users (because he really does send out emails from time to time, just not this time).
8) Freehostinn> (freehostinn.com) Until today, March 5, 2007, Dataracks.net hosted the free web-hosting site Freehostinn.com. But yesterday, Freehostinn announced that it was discontinuing its services. Freehostinn did not offer to pay its affiliates the referral commissions they had recently earned (10 cents per referral to their free hosting plan). In fact Freehostinn owes me $21.40, and I can only conclude that Freehostinn was a scam from its very inception.
Freehostinn.com was using its free web-hosting service to refer customers to Hostgator.com and to Dataracks.net. Freehostinn offered free web-hosting accounts and then (for a fee) offered its customers paid upgrades to Hostgator hosting accounts (Hostgator is not free). Obviously both Hostgator and Dataracks should choose their affiliates and customers more wisely. Freehostinn made money from referrals and its business practices reflect badly on Hostgator and Dataracks. And it seems that both Hostgator and Dataracks made money from Freehostinn's duplicity.
