Cpa – Where’s my Money
As if we don’t deal with enough bullshit on a daily basis, the hands down most infuriating thing a CPA publisher can go through is of course being dicked around or stiffed on a payment.
Unfortunately, unless you are what’s commonly referred to as a Tier 1 publisher who is driving a minimum of a few thousand dollars a week to a network, you have a very good chance of facing this situation at least a few times during the development of your career.
Networks and merchants make a lot of money screwing over their small time publishers, I don’t think that’s a secret to many anymore, and the main reason I setup my own to work with my top performing offers privately.
Sadly even going direct to the merchant produces the same issue, I don’t know of any publisher who hasn’t been unjustly screwed out of a payment at least once.
You sort of have to come to terms with the fact that you are working in an industry who’s main goal is to make as much money off of your hard work as possible while paying you the least possible, which is of course not unlike any other industry.
The good news is that the few who know how to fight back, almost never have an issue collecting their money.
For a couple of years now, I’ve been discussing openly that a solid letter from a lawyer does wonders for getting paid even if you did in fact break terms of service.
The funny thing about terms of service for CPA networks is that it’s sort of like the tax code, you basically can’t not break it in at least some small way even if unintentional, and if they want to get you, they can generally find a way to do it.
Forget blackhat traffic, fraud, or using an unapproved traffic source like Craigslist or Myspace, if you read the fine print you agree to at sign up you are essentially saying it’s ok to steal your money any time they want, without any reason, what a great business model….for them.
Oh what? You mean you don’t want to expose your entire system that you spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours perfecting to deliver leads? Well too fucking bad, because you can have your payment withheld just based on that.
They can tell you your account produced a high level of fraud leads, of course they don’t need to prove that, give you any of the lead information that was passed or even the chance to prove otherwise.
And of course there’s the fly by night networks and merchants that never had any intention on paying you in the first place.
The good news for you is that most publishers just crawl under a rock, maybe they’ll post on a forum like WickedFire that they got screwed over, whine for a few days and that’s basically it.
