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Facebook's War Against Dating Affiliates (40)

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I lost two 5k and two 2k accounts recently.

Here is an email from a facebook rep.




So now not only will affiliates get their own accounts banned, but they will get the whole dating website blacklisted on Facebook as well.
Probably why a lot of offers updated their restrictions to 'no fb traffic' recently.

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Would love to see what the rep was saying in his last section about the history and x-out rates if you don't mind?

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Wow that's intense.. bound to happen sooner or later.

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I heard its been happening a lot over the last 1-2 weeks. Needs to be a group therapy thread, i know the pain!

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I've lost a 5k, a 2k & multiple 1k accounts in past 10-15 days. I've been running dating only since past 4-5 months & have well made over 250k in revenue so I definitely can feel you bro. On new accounts, the first ads that I create for fan pages get approved within 15 minutes & after that when I create ads for dating - instaban!

I do wonder how you ended up getting a rep on 5k account?

PS - I'm from India as well

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It was some very specific advice about the ads I was running. Basically she wants me to follow the dating guidelines

losing those accounts is not that big a deal.

What really matters is this:
Facebook is going to ban all dating affiliates sooner or later. They will allow only very few affiliates to advertise dating offers. The offer owner will choose which affiliates can advertise on Facebook and he will also be responsible for the affiliate's ads. If facebook receives multiple complaints about a particular affiliate, they will ban ALL affiliate accounts running that offer in addition to blacklisting the dating site.

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Its not surprising they are cleaning it up. Pretty much every ad on my 2nd account yesterday for uk was a cloaked dating ad. And I selected a good range of interests in that account for keeping an eye on ads.. just shit loads of cloaked semi adult offers.. which would never be approved normally.

Disclaimer. Nothing against it.. ive ran dating on fb a few times. But looking from fbs point of view...

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I had 90 ads disapproved on my 5k account recently, strange thing is that they hadn't been ran in 6+ months.
Luckily haven't had any problems with losing accounts.

Sounds like a huge automated cleanup, perhaps based on reported ads in the past / linked domains.

From what I recall they did the same this time last year, Bob aka the Grinch.

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latest email:

At 16:00 today effective immediately we will only allow dating advertisers who are working within our managed book of business. This means that you must have a Facebook sales representative in order to buy dating ads on Facebook. Our ambition is that this will be the first major step in cleaning up the site and hope to see a significant decrease in bad dating ads the coming weeks.

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There's been rumors for months about this.

I've talked to a Facebook rep and pretty much confirmed it. They had a meeting at Facebook HQ last month with all the top dating advertisers.

Basically the only people who will be able to do dating on Facebook are advertisers themselves, and whitelisted affiliates. That means you have to submit your account #, and have it associated with the dating company, and be approved. I think now it's a 1-strike ban policy. Get a dating ad retroed, lose the account.

Remember that with every policy change, there's always opportunity. The guys who will be whitelisted will be in an environment where most of the competition's gone, and they don't have to compete against risque images.

The issue is the images just kept getting worse and worse. It was getting to the point where I saw almost naked girls on my spy tools, because people had to push it that far to get a decent CTR / CPC. Facebook had to do something before the PR got too bad.

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I have also heard that it is also now a no mercy policy for getting caught out cloaking. Be careful out there.

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Yup my accounts are no longer getting dating ads approved but all current ads are still running. Just a matter of time (i'm guessing before all ads are retrod). On to bigger and better things, and yea only the strong will survive and these challenges will definitely bring opportunity.

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I got all my inactive ads also banned whenever I wanted to restart them. Has anyone a good suggestion what I should do next? Thanks a lot. Please click here to see my follow along thread.

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Time to adapt and find other opportunities.

Don't be the guy who starts whining about how unfair all of this is (Facebook/Panda/Penguin etc etc.).

It may sound harsh, but this is unfortunately the nature of the game, and complaining about it will not get you anywhere. Instead, use it as a wakeup call on the need to constantly innovate and build a business with long term value.

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Your ad wasn't approved because ads for dating sites and apps are only allowed from approved advertisers at this time

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I guess we just have to work out other verticals and angles to make FB profitable. On the bright side this is likely to be unsaturated for a while.

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yup, more available inventory at cheaper prices for affiliates promoting other offers

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White labeling sounds like a solution here.

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Nope , there is only a list of dating offers approved so that's all you can run for now.

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When was it ever any different? FB doesn't check for cloaking. The only people that have been caught cloaking did not use the cloaker correctly. If they are suspicious enough and/or you have enough people reporting your ads, you're gone, it really doesn't matter. Gay people and married people will report your ads after they tire of them. Gay married people (thanks Obama) are the most sensitive ones.

My view on all this: who cares, less competition. I hope they make it so every account requires verified phone conversation with a FB rep + credit card + utility bill + semen sample. I love high barriers of entry because it just means more profit for the persistent affiliates.

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Affiliate marketing is kinda like selling drugs. Insane ROI, but at any day the FBI can knock on ur door at 4am and poof it's all gone. Same thing with cloaking - 30k/day, only to go down to 0 the next. It's a mindset thing I guess. Wanna be rich or wanna be wealthy? good question to ask yourself.

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If you are slinging 30k/day in drugs -- even that soft shit or just regulated class amphetamines like Adderal or Cialis etc, when the FBI comes knocking (kicking down) on your door, you do not go down to 0 the next day, your life is never going to be the same ever again and your wealth will be seized or at the very least out of reach if you diversified and hid it well.

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What do you expect when people are cloaking ADULT offers on a social networking platform? There's always desperate affiliates who are chasing a quick buck and willing to push the 'easy' angles using cleavage, leg shots, celeb angles. Unfortunately this time all dating affiliates have been screwed, thus raising the bar once again & creating a healthy niche for those who can crack the code.

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Yeah, this is all about false claims and unacceptable business practices of the back-end dating sites. No matter which angle you choose to convince people to sign up through your LP, on the most of dating websites they won't get what you have promised them, nor they will find new faces that they haven't seen before on the dating giants. Nowadays, thanks to a couple of WL solutions, the dating sites are growing like mushrooms after the rain, and all of them recycle the same mix of old DB's of users and bots. Just do a little research on numerous complaints from real users who feel that they have been scammed.

There is a good old suggestion for affiliates on how to promote any product online:

1. Buy the product
2. Try it and use it yourself
3. Write your honest review based on your own experience

I wonder how much money we'd have to waste to be able to find a new dating offer that adds some real value for customers?

In other words, if you facilitate sales of the crap in a beautiful wrap, claiming that there's premium chocolate inside, don't expect that the consumers will thank you and buy some more, and the FB will allow you to run your ads endlessly.

The only way is to keep (or to start) referring new customers to the dating giants that have a good reputation and high customer satisfaction levels.

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Ohhh That again! feeling 2009/10 google adwords ban hammer again, same-same. I think most of us knew that this will happen eventually, Planty of other niches out there... hmm

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Now that they've decided to try shut down a niche entirely let's see if they go for others next: specifically weight loss!

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Aren't most weight loss offers banned anyway already? Also, won't this push more people into cloaking blacklisted dating offers?

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You can get around banned niches by cloaking obviously. But to avoid being obvious, advertisers will have to use other angles - most likely lowering the conversion rate significantly since you're not being direct about what you're promoting when they get to your lander (the banner can't say exactly what you want if it's not allowed). So you gotta either get really creative, or hope that since competition is less, the lower conversion rate could still be profitable (I assume anytime you have to cloak to get something past, it would be a higher barrier to entry).

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Yea it's still possible to bypass the new rules, but it's going to be difficult for two main reasons:

a) Before if you were running a risque ad, you could get your ads retro'ed a few times before the account gets banned. Now it sounds like your account will get banned at 1 strike.

b) Now that they are on the lookout for dating ads, anything resembling an attractive woman will raise flags. Might be harder to get the images approved to begin with. The good news is you won't have to go as crazy as before to get a decent CTR.

This is all theory of course since the rules were just added. But I'm just gonna check out my spy tools the next few months and see how people adapt.

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Yep That's basically what I was saying... Either get really creative or perhaps it won't be needed to get the insane CTR since there will be less competition. Definitely makes things more difficult, but that usually will help the really creative people get their campaigns going with less competition.. Low barrier to entry usually means you need larger budget to just OutDo the others.. High barrier to entry allows people with creativity and knowledge to get a heads up.

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Well they disapproved every dating ad I had this morning.

Not sure if anyone else got hit today (Today being January 4th)

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I still see quite some dating ads on my FB wall today.

Actually I see 5 dating ads and 3 go to a lander with nude pictures.

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Has anyone else experienced unpaused ads getting retro'd as well? I have some I want to unpause but don't want to lose the acct/have all ads retro'd. Thanks!

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I got all my paused adds retro'd but I have my running adds still running for some reason.. lets see how long it goes..

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Added you on skype bro

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All dating adds retro'd today...

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Retro'd? As in went back to the 80s?

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"Retro'd" in this case means "retrospectively disapproved" - in other words, disallowed from running on FB even if they were in approved campaigns.

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Basically they go back and mark them all as disapproved. So they can no longer run. Also if you try to resubmit or copy the campaign
they just deny it.

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I lost most of mine last night as well. Has anyone gotten whitelisted through an aff network yet? My rep at Adsim was looking into it but everything still seems to be one giant mess and nobody is sure what to do.

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