Hi All,

Do you use or operate an Affiliate scheme?

If you do then what is your experience/success with such schemes. I am only talking games of course, yours or someone elses.

It would also be nice to have an idea on what sort of commision deals people offer/or are offered.

Thanks in advanc for any replys.

Alfie

I started an affiliate program a few months ago, with limited success. Right now, about 5% of my sales are affiliate generated, and almost all of those sales come from a single affiliate. It's easy to implement though, and certainly worth doing :-)

5% of your sales after only a few months sounds very good to me.

What are affiliattes looking for in terms of a percentage?

Alfie

It totally depends on the affiliate. I set my base commission at 15 percent, but I make it clear to the affiliate that they can negotiate more, depending on volume.

That negotiable 15% subject to volume sounds reasonable.

Do the affiliattes host a special version of your demo, therefore increasing their bandwith costs? Or, do they just provide a special link to your site?

Alfie

How about using the affiliate system for reselling other people's games? As far as I can think (this is just speculation), it solves the cross-selling problem for starting sites, and it creates a viable way of creating income using freeware games with adds for affiliate games.

I host the downloads. Bandwidth is cheap, and I want to know what is being downloaded. I'd even host the files for my tucows downloads if they'd let me.

Currently, I have 2 ways of doing it. Mainly, I provide a download link that cookies the person downloading. Then, come purchase time, this cookie is read and the affiliate info populated. I pass the affiliate ID on to the BMT order form, and they take care of the rest.

I can also do a special version to accomplish the same task, and it's a bit better, because the user can't delete a cookie. I do this only in rare cases though. Building too many versions is a pain. I guess an innosetup batch file could resolve this....

EDIT: I have considered publishing a game using this method, but BMT has agreed to just pay royalties to a developer for me if this situation happens. So I would just go with that method. Easy accounting for me, and the developer always gets paid on time :)


-Mike