In the previous posts we worked out how to open an affiliate network for gambling, crypto and nutra. Today, let’s tackle dating. Why should you only get into building a dating affiliate network with serious experience under your belt? This vertical is full of contradictions. On one hand, traffic here is dirt cheap and payouts are low. On the other, there are tons of offers and plenty of money if you do things right. But my position is simple: if you don’t have hands-on experience with dating, you’re better off opening an affiliate network in a different vertical. Gambling or nutra are just the thing for relative beginners.
The Main Headache: Offers
You’d think finding and connecting offers in dating would be the easiest thing in the world. Just like in gambling. The algorithm:
- Sign up with any competitor’s affiliate network.
- Follow the offer link through to the site.
- Find the advertiser’s contact details.
- Write to them and strike a deal.
Repeat until you’ve collected as many offers as you want. You can also message other networks’ support posing as an affiliate and ask which offers are the best to pour traffic on. Whatever they recommend is what you connect. That makes life a whole lot easier.
The trouble starts, though, once you get to technically connecting the advertisers:
- Most of them are painfully slow. And they have no idea what’s being asked of them at all. We once had a case where a postback took six months to hook up. It never did get hooked up.
- Tiny caps. The standard story: you’re allocated 100 registrations a day per GEO, each worth a couple of cents.
- There are too many of them. Some advertisers don’t just work with a single GEO — they work with a single region of a single country.
As a result, you find yourself with an urgent need to generate smartlinks. These “smart links” send users to the right offer according to a set algorithm. They take into account:
- Payout;
- Cap;
- Traffic source;
- GEO;
- Time;
- Other minor parameters.
Already at the offer-setup stage, the network runs into staggering losses of time and resources onboarding advertisers and building smartlinks. Of course, with the right software — AlterCPA Pro, for instance — you can make life easier for yourself. Good built-in analytics and genuinely smart smartlinks let you squeeze real profit out of your traffic. A smartlink in AlterCPA decides on its own where to send the user, going by EPC and country, and with rotation switched on it shows them a new site on every click instead of the same one over and over. But even so, putting together a proper pool of offers will eat up every last nerve before the affiliate network even launches.
Reconciliations and payouts in dating happen in an extremely strange way, too. They can cut your payout for anything, any way they please. Prove your case, get to the bottom of it, stand your ground? In gambling you sometimes can; in dating you can’t. If the advertiser says it’s fraud, then it’s fraud. That’s why it’s absolutely mandatory to always give the advertiser information about the traffic source — the affiliate on your network’s side — so the advertiser can kill off just one affiliate rather than your entire network.
Recruiting Affiliates
I’ve already covered how to find affiliates — you can read about it here. For dating, affiliates are recruited the same way as for any other vertical.
Keep in mind, though, that these are the guys who work with the cheapest traffic sources out there, including everyone’s least favorite: doorways.
Which leads to the obvious problem: an indecently high share of junk traffic, plus demands for full payout — as if they were pouring traffic straight from Google at a few cents a click. I really don’t envy the support teams at dating networks.
Conclusion
A dating affiliate network faces relatively little competition. Thanks to that, build a competent network in this vertical and you can make very decent money. But the actual process of building and launching one is a wild headache:
- Collect a huge pool of offers.
- Go through all nine circles of hell connecting hundreds and thousands of advertisers who stall at every bump in the road.
- Build smartlinks with quality algorithms.
- Recruit affiliates with decent traffic.
- Fend off affiliates demanding to be paid for traffic the advertiser flagged as spam. That happens in every vertical, but in dating it happens especially often.
If you do have dating experience after all, start with our guide to launching AlterCPA for dating: it walks you through everything step by step, from picking a server to setting up smartlinks. For offers with a huge number of countries and a separate payout for each, the guide has two tips. First: hide the payout column and move the payout table into the offer’s extended description. The second is the most honest one: hire an employee with nerves of steel to handle their setup.