AffSpy: Epic Failboat

27 March
38 Comments
by nickycakes

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Affspy launched it’s private beta last month at Affiliate Summit. The service was hyped by uberaffiliate in january, back when people still thought he posted useful information, so it had a little buzz going. But in the end, just like most overhyped services like izea ranks, blogrush, ttz media, agloco, etc, it’s just that, overhyped crap, and here’s why:

 

First, what is Affspy? The idea is kinda cool, aggregate payouts from all the affiliate networks so affiliates can see if they could get a better offer elsewhere. Well, the idea WAS cool back when Offer Vault already made the exact same service. But, after investigating, only the idea is cool, the service (both offer vault and affspy) is pretty much worthless.

 

So what’s the big deal? Why does a website that pulls all the payout data from all the networks and displays it to help affiliates get a higher payout suck so bad? Let Nickycakes count the ways.

 

 

  1. The street payouts for an offer on ANY network are NEVER EVER the highest amount they can give you for that offer…EVER. In fact, as a new affiliate to a network, you can nearly always get a higher payout than what is advertised simply by asking your AM “hey, can i get a higher payout on offer X?” So right off the bat, the service is completely inaccurate. Using AffSpy to check the payouts will never NEVER give you an accurate picture of what the highest payout is.
  2. They make the networks do the work for them. It would literally take an evening or two to make a scraper to grab the payout data, creatives, etc, from all the networks automatically every day, but they actually make the affiliate networks sign up and do work, and then end up charging the networks for the referrals they send.
  3. They literally have a “team” of people for something that would literally require one person a couple hours a day to run. At Affiliate Summit West, Nickycakes was surprised to see that a service this stupid and simple actually had a booth with several people running it.

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    There was at least one semi-hot girl there who probably had the excuse of being hired by affspy to attract people to the booth, but other than that….over 5 people to run what’s basically a scraper site…?

  4. AffSpy is designed to screw affiliates. Affspy makes its money by referring affiliates to networks. They get a cut of anywhere from 2-5% for the lifetime commissions made by those affiliates, in general. The network referral programs are designed to let affiliates recommend good networks to their friends and contacts, and the commission is supposed to be payment for bringing your friends to do business with the company. Affspy is no better than someone cybersquatting neverblueads.cm and redirecting it to a neverblue referral link to catch typo traffic and leech referral revenue. Just remember, every referral they get from you could have easily gone to one of your friends in the industry, or someone who’s given you some help getting started in the business and has actually helped you make money. These people deserve a chunk of your profit, not some retarded non-service like affspy.
  5. AffSpy is unoriginal. As was mentioned earlier, this ENTIRE WEBSITE was already created by the idiots at affiliate radar, and is called OfferVault.com. It’s also not in some d-bag “exclusive” private beta designed to make people think they need to join the cool guy club and join it. Keep in mind that both services are equally crappy, but offervault.com gets points for not needing 20 people to run it and not being associated with mediocre john chow knockoffs.

 

But not all is bad with affspy! The “exclusive affiliate summit beta invite” cards they were handing out make decent coasters and the t-shirt they gave Nickycakes proved awesome for cleaning up spills in the kitchen!

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