For those of you considering participating in affiliate programs, or suggesting websites to friends in the hopes of obtaining referral commissions, specifically top site / affiliate site owners, please hear my warning regarding the website SatoshiBet.com:
Disclaimer: Prior to this incident, I would like to note that SatoshiBet was my preferred affiliate program and that I spent the majority of my time marketing for them for this reason.I was earning significant daily revenue from my referrals (300+ users) from the time period of 12/1/2013 - 12/17/2013, and noticed an immediate and significant drop in revenue as of 12/18/2013. This drop caused me to lose 98-99% of my revenue.
I contacted SatoshiBet support to request information regarding any change to their affiliate program and was provided the below response:
Hi
No, we haven't changed the affiliate program. We did reset cookies for everyone at some point, this might cause the drop, as players who didn't have their address bookmarked, created a new account on return. This was a one time thing and should not happen again.
I know this is not optimal, we are looking to implement a user registration system as an alternative to the unique address auth system we have now.
Best regards
This indicates to me that SatoshiBet performed an arbitrary cookie reset, which is not acceptable for a cookie based affiliate program. Understandably, users should be retaining their account keys (the link which provides them access to their account), however it appears in my case that of my 300 referred users, very few actually did.
I responded to support asking if any compensation would be provided to users with significant drop in referral commission, or if they would issue a warning on their affiliate program page that such a radical drop can occur unannounced. I also mentioned that if SatoshiBet continues to see a normal trend in user play/profit, however a significant drop in referral payouts, something isn't right with that situation.
Support has not responded to my most recent e-mail.
I hope this is helpful to some of you who are considering spending your time accumulating a user base for a specific affiliate program. Choose wisely.
