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From Affiliates to Starting a Network, questions on technology solutions. (34)

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Hi there!

we're a group of three friends already making it big in the biz, (over 10k/day) and we're considering opening a Network just for us an some other friends that will come along.

Would love to know your opinions on which would be the best software solutions. There are basically 3 things we would like to implement sort of together.

- Affiliate Network (with good reports and options capabilities, cpm, cpa, revshare...)
- Smartlink solution (in-house would be the most costly option but i guess at the beginning it's better to find something proven to work).
- Tracker (would be another pillar in the structure)

Any suggestion would be more than appreciated, we would like to have those 3 solutions kind of seamlessly integrated together.

I guess best option is in-house all of them but it's not only money expensive but we would like to go live as soon as possible. So time it's sensible matter.

Thanks and keep on rocking

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best solutions at the moment for you are Cake and Hasoffers.

take in mind that although both platforms cover you in sense of tracking and reporting, none of them can help you detect fraud and other stuff that can jeopardize your new network.

operating a network is much harder than operating as an affiliate, it another state of mind so you should think about it and see if it will be worth your time and money or if it will be wiser to continue as an affiliate.

in any case good luck in any of the roads you will take, and feel free to PM me should you have more questions or need any help.

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I think i can give you some good insights since we started a network 8 months ago.

Regarding the trackers; Cake is not customisable, whereas Hasoffers has an API you can make use of. I am not sure to what extent you can customise the dashboard and the reports. If you want to keep the network open for just a handful of people I wouldn't advise you to take either Cake or Hasoffers. You are looking at at least a one year contract and depending on the traffic you are sending (with pops for example) the costs can get really high really fast.

Another solution is Adcumulus. It's way cheaper, but the interface and usability is not getting close to HO or Cake.

I am not sure if a smartlink solution is the USP you are looking for. A lot of the bigger affiliates have their own solutions or are using one of the proven ones (i can suggest you some 3th party ones if you want).

Do bear in mind that running an affiliate network is a marginal business, your monthly revenues need to be way higher in order to be profitable. This obviously puts a lot of pressure on your cashflow. Also managing an affiliate network is extremely time consuming. Think about finding advertisers, implementing offers. making and signing IO's, matching stats, invoicing, finance, resolving issues (advertisers not paying), recruiting affiliates and talking to them 24/7 basically.

Having that said it has still been the most rewarding and awesome journey i have ever experienced, but you will have to think about it very carefully because it will basically changing everything for you guys.

If you need more in-depth answers let me know. I'd be glad to help out!

Fabi
Gotzha

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Beside this what was already told you should now that for example hasoffers has high pricing.
They invoice you per traffic so if you are doing pops or some other sources which generate a lot of traffic this could be really expensive.

Hasoffers
http://www.hasoffers.com/pricing/
1 million clicks/month $800usd, which means like 33k clicks per day.

I had experience when some affiliate we approved dumped by error one day 500k of some bot traffic, and than we ended up paying with a lot of money to hasoffers.

You need to know some starting traffic amounts for these calculations.

We made own aff. network and compared to price we payed to hasoffers investment payed off in like 9 month.

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As a network, you really need your own technology/platform if you want to become big. You cant do it with a third party technology like hasoffers because you end up paying way too much money to them.
Also as an affiliate I would be really suspicious of any network using hasoffers or cake as these platforms have a standard option to scrub conversions.

If you are mid-sized network you'll do at least 50 million clicks a month (without running any pop traffic that is) so given that 800$ will get you a mere 1 million clicks, you can easily see how much this is gonna cost you.

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Some of the biggest networks run on 3th party tracking solutions, so it is definitely possible. Yes, it is very expensive and if you are really thinking long-term (matter of years) it might be more cost-beneficial to create your own tracker but you will need a big tech department to do so. You can make some good deals with HO and Cake to minimise the costs (the cpc of both trackers are way lower than 800$ for 1 mill clicks btw). Also, Hasoffers doesn't have the option to throttle leads, you can integrate it yourself though with their API.

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I went through this same exact situation.

Cake is the best solution if you are thinking of bringing on lots of affiliates... big affs and advertisers are more familiar with the interface.

HasOffers is more of a 'software-first' company, and better overall imo.

Feel free to directly message me if you ever have any more private questions about starting a network, im an open book.

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They have to take more margin (i.e. give lower payouts to affiliates) because they need to pay a ton of money to hasoffers or cake!
Be very very wary of networks using third party tracking technology!

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Thank god it's proven that it's impossible for a custom solution to have that too.


Mehdi

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Spot on, whoever wants to shave leads will find a way to do that, period. Saying that running with a network on a 3rd party solution is more risky than a network with their own scriptage is nonsense, it all depends on who runs that particular network.

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Networks that use 3rd party technology are more inclined to, and have a bigger incentive to scrub as they have huge monthly tracking costs to cope with.
They can't offer their affiliates lower payouts than networks with their own technology because then they would be out of business...so they need to take the margin from somewhere else.

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Congratz to the big plans, Fabi of Gotzha already wrote some really good stuff.
We founded our Mainstream network 3 month ago as a mainstream spinoff of Brokerbabe, so I feel you, I am very happy that we can use the
same software that is a in House product. So at least this question was not on the table for me
You mentioned the Smartlink, if you are not running an adult network, then forget it, for mainstream it dont make too much sense and for the mainstream traffic that wanna be converted over a smartlink you have already dozens of solutions out there. Focus on putting offers from the verticals that you are strong in, into your network.

Good luck!

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Coders/developers are not free either, I was always a fan of custom solutions for a long time until I realized it is cheaper to "rent" a pre-made solution than keeping a team of coders in MANY cases. Obviously, once the network grows enough, it should be more cost effective to use an in-house solution than to pay someone on a per-click basis. The question is how big % of the profits would cake/hasoffers represent in case of this large network and whether they would actually care about such a cost so much to shave the leads from their affiliates.

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If you don't use cake or hasoffers, make sure you KNOW HOW TO SETUP TRACKING from the affiliate's perspective. Nothing makes me want to smash my head against a desk more than figuring out some weird propriety tracking solution that only works half the time.

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Christoph, not sure why you are trying to bash on most of the affiliate networks with these statements. Moreover it's completely untrue in every single way.

Like matuloo mentioned, having an entire tech team to build, support and maintain an affiliate network tracker is definitely not cheap. Also I would never think of the costs of cake when giving my affiliates a certain payout. If the cost of your tracker are so high you need to think about that kind of stuff you did some terrible negotiations with your platform.
The only thing that we do, and I consider that as a good thing, is that when we see a million clicks going to an offer and making 10 bucks we just tell the affiliate to pause it. Not only because it saves us the traffic costs but it's most likely not good for the affiliate either. Just makes us a bit sharper. I am not sure what kind of prizes you think are involved when working with Cake or HO but I think its way different than what you have in mind.

I can also imagine that when you have a custom platform you can customise certain 'throttle' tools way better than Cake for example. Saying that cake or HO networks throttle - or throttle more because of the high tracker costs is kind of insulting.

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Gotzcha, I really don't know where to start. The first question that pops to mind is if you have been living on planet Mars and just made it to Earth?

1. "Like matuloo mentioned, having an entire tech team to build, support and maintain an affiliate network tracker is definitely not cheap."
Having an in-house team is expensive but the tipping point of it becoming cheaper than working with a third party technology is obtained very fast.
Here is Hasoffers standard pricing plan: http://www.hasoffers.com/compare-features/ Lets say you are a master negotiator and reduce the price with 75%. That would mean you are still paying 200$ for every 1m clicks. If you run pop traffic - this is gonna cost you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per month.

2. "Also I would never think of the costs of cake when giving my affiliates a certain payout. If the cost of your tracker are so high you need to think about that kind of stuff you did some terrible negotiations with your platform."
Maybe you don't have a business mindset but believe me, the owners of Matomy, Mundo, Maxbounty, whatever network do and they calculate this cost and all other costs to the cent. If you are a big network, the cost of your tracker is going to significantly impact your bottom line in a negative way. One possible way to counter this, and that happens a lot, is scrubbing. Networks with 3rd party trackers are more INCLINED to scrub just because of this reason. Whether one specific network scrubs or not depends on their management but as a general trend, they as a whole are more inclined to scrub.

3. "The only thing that we do, and I consider that as a good thing, is that when we see a million clicks going to an offer and making 10 bucks we just tell the affiliate to pause it."
Most big networks have +20,000 affiliates in their system out of which 5% are superaffiliates and 95% are small but high-quality affiliates. People with a small blog, email database or media buyers that do this as an extra on top of their salary. A network makes A LOT of their money - and margin - on these small affiliates. No self-respecting network is ever gonna turn down any affiliate that drives high quality traffic, no matter how small or big that affiliate is. What they do is they give a big affiliate a personalized approach and the small affiliate an automated approach via the platform with automatic payments.

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You should read posts closely when replying to them. What gotzha posted was that they ask affiliates to stop traffic when they send a MILLION of clicks and generate 10 bucks in revenue, which is everything but quality traffic from a small blog. So your reply is as irrelevant as it gets.

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Wow what a discussion. I feel like on GFY

Anyway our friend Hunterapp wants to start his network, it would not make sense to hire a team of coders to set up a plattform for the start and yes there are plenty of OK alternatives on the market. We had Brokerbabe running on Open X for 4 years until we got our own solution. Not that I would recommend anybody Open X nowadays but you can build up something nice with a budget solution (and Gotzha recommended Adcumulus) and move then to a own solution when you bank big time.

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Christoph in reply to your latest post.

I just quoted myself here. I never did say that you shouldn't build your own platform and that it indeed might be more cost-beneficial on the long-term. I am just completely not agreeing that you are saying you shouldn't trust networks that work with 3th party trackers because they scrub more, it is just not true and you are insulting a lot of networks by saying that.

It also completely depends on the situation if you should get a custom solution or not. For example, we started out just 10 months ago (more or less). The initial packages you can get are pretty cheap and they are customisable. Can you imagine what would have happened if we would have decided to have build our own solution right away without knowing how much traffic you can expect in the first place?

- 3 full time developers monitoring the tracker 24 hours (what happens when you have downtime?) (I can tell you the costs of 3 experienced developers would be more expensive than the costs we have now with Cake)
- Hosting everything yourself
- Develop your own interface

Managing and monitoring this would be way more pricy and risky when you are starting out.

And actually the first response (in general) of affiliates when they see you are working with cake is always positive. Might not be because of the functionalities but they know that Cake is a well-known product and it is also known that it's quite expensive. Therefore they trust us quickly and they know we have the financial resources to pay them.

I might be from a different planet but I'm pretty sure i'm not in the wrong here and that you are making statements that are completely unfounded and without facts

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To hunterapp:

As this turned more into a discussion about networks using cake/hasoffers being legit or not (which by the way, politely said, I couldn't disagree more with as it has nothing to do with a network using cake/hasoffers or any custom solution to be doing fair business or not), I'd start off with a pre-built solution in your case. If the operation grows by time, you can still do the move to something inhouse.

From what you said, it seems you're looking for a solution for a smaller group of people in the beginning. Therefore, I'd definitely go with cake/hasoffers first. Actually I'm quite surprised nobody mentioned liteclicks, which can reduce the costs of cake significantly for 'low quality' traffic, think pops etc... Then as others mentioned already, it's always a matter of negotiation with those companies.

For smartlink solutions, I'd go with some rotators first rather than building everything in house. Until you run on a certain scale, just take a couple of proven rotators as options to see who's best in what geo and segments.

Going with hasoffers or cake is a tricky question, I personally don't know the exact differences as I never used any of them, but what I hear from people working in networks with either one of the options, most seem to prefer cake. Just reach out to both, get a presentation, do your calcs and take it from there.

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Monetizer is built on a completely custom platform too - guess what happened... we had people sending millions of clicks at an eCPM where our bandwidth costs been higher than the profit we made of this traffic, so we had to ask them to send somewhere else. So yeah, Fabi is spot on here and it does not only happen to those shady cake networks Obviously this barrier might be lower for anything built custom, but it's not like you can take any traffic with a custom solution.

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I wish FB's ban hammer would come visit STM from time to time. <3

Cake and HasOffers are your options- get demos and quotes for both for your type and volume of traffic and scaling potential. Changing platforms midway sucks, so be sure you understand the reporting on your end as a network and from the affiliate side, and also the tech limitations each platform has.

PS: Don't forget to turn on that scrub on your friends' campaigns to recover costs.

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We started using Cake back in November 2015 and it's been a excellent solution for us. We initially started with HasOffers but moved to Cake shortly after (they let use a smaller package called cupCAKE until we needed an upgrade) and we haven't looked back. The familiarity and ease of Cake is what sold it for us, I suppose you need to decide whats going to fit your needs the best and go from there. If you're considering using Cake their cupcake plan is definitely a great place to start.

-dub

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What were the reasons you weren't satisfied with HO?

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Cake and HO are definitely the big players but also the most expensive ones. so I guess your choice would depend on how big of a network you aim to become...
If you aim to become big then I guess costs shouldn't worry you to much as you'll need to spend a lot more on a lot more other stuff so In that case i would recommend HO more as its more user friendly for the affiliate, Has great reporting system and super fast support team.

If you aim to start as a medium to small network you can check cheaper alternatives like Afftrack - much cheaper and you only need to commit on a monthly basis (Cake and HO works on yearly contracts). although take into account that its not good looking and refined as HO and Cake.

Please feel free to contact me for any other question or info...

Oh and good luck and good job!!!

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Hey,

I went from being a publisher (Not as big as you though) to starting my own network around 5 months ago.

Regarding tracking, we are currently using Hasoffers, and is pretty happy with it.
I personally hired an India tech girl to setup pixels etc, both to save some time, but also because I simply couldn't understand it, haha.

To make it big, you need to partner up with a lot of good publishers/advertisers.

You have to get the campaigns directly from advertisers, in order to match publishers current payout.

For payment terms, most networks pays Net30-45, but you probably already know that!
To be attractive for publishers, you need to be ably to pay ASAP, weekly or bi-weekly would be the best!

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I am preparing to open my own network also but it is some offers in Thailand only ;-) .. I will keep reading all comments here ! .. Thanks for info!

Tony

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There's a ton of networks popping up every single day. Many use women as their AMs hoping to hone in the 'horny affiliate'. And it works, to some extent - hell thats why they do it.

But if you want to start a network, you really need to have an advantage that sets you apart.

Having payments every 3 days will not be a big set me apart thing, nor will exclusive offers - everyone has exclusive offers.

Maybe a person who can explain things clearly, spoon feed affiliates information so they will direct benefit is an asset to you - but if you do this, how long will they stay loyal and not split test the offers with another network?

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If you give them the accounts from where they can do the mediabuys (fb, google, etc) and if you give the affiliates free lessons/courses in different traffic sources so they can learn something from you. A bit like a 'university' - some networks are going into this direction and of course this is being done to make the affiliate loyal to you. Also presents help, but to a lesser extent, such as iphone, ipad, macbook, paid honeymoon, etc.

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Has anyone tried this one?

https://www.offerslook.com

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This is just another hasoffers. When choosing to work with cake vs hasoffers vs offerslook vs whatever tracker you have to realize they are all pretty much the same. Its becoming a very standardized product which means the competition is all about the price. Go with the one who offers you zero fixed costs (start-up, maintenance, technical fees, whatever they call it to get money out of you) and the one offering the lowest CPC/CPM pricing for your needs.

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Most would consider it common sense in business to go with a prebuilt, proven and managed SaaS with predictable costs and zero startup time when you are entering into a new area.

Why risk a lot more capital and waste time building something under such uncertain circumstances?

There is no dilemma here, you don't need to choose one or the other when you can start with A and later progress to B if it becomes both economical and practical.

You don't know if this network idea is going to work out at all. You don't know how successful it will be. You likely can't predict the overall levels of traffic & costs unless you are using it for yourself only and know your own traffic metrics well.

But, you probably do know the minimum costs of a SaaS subscription.

Unless you:
- have investigated scalable infrastructure and understand the costs from server/CDN/DNS/database components,
- have a solid idea of what your per-visit costs will be for the SaaS vs custom solution,
- are willing to invest capital in building it,
- are not in a rush to get started,
- can quickly hire and lead a team of senior developers, a UI designer, DevOps/server admin,
- have a person in your team who is a marketer that understands tracking/infrastructure and can basically take a CTO-like position and lead that dev team,
- and ultimately you know what you want to build, can detail features and specifics and plan the infrastructure right now...

...then you should not be trying to build an affiliate network platform.

I have lots of gripes with Cake/HO and the entire systems, the way they are hosted and perform and so on, but I certainly would not try to build my own from scratch.

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Building your own technology is the right decision in the long term, when you are sure that you are going to scale. Which you are not in the beginning. In the beginning there is uncertainty so its indeed the best decision to start off with a third party system.

One thing I don't really agree with is:
"There is no dilemma here, you don't need to choose one or the other when you can start with A and later progress to B if it becomes both economical and practical."

Switching 100 live campaigns from one platform to the other, updating all the logins from your affiliates and advertisers, and making sure they use your new system when you switch is quite unpractical. So the switching cost is definitely there. But then again hasoffers, cake, offerslook, etc... its all becoming more and more the same - a very standardized commodity product whereby all competition comes down to who offers you the best pricing conditions. Every dollar you pay to your tracker is a dollar less in margin.

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Yeah , i try it , very expensive

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