This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we'll be speaking with Stefan Muehlbauer of Affpal. We've got an events section on our website. You can find out all about the events in our industry and get discounts on some events. You'll find all that and more at adultsitebroker.com. We're proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You'll find articles on age verification laws and other attacks on our industry. It's to raise awareness of our industry's plight in the war on porn. You'll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. And we're always looking for buyers and sellers of adult sites and companies. Perhaps you've been thinking about either selling your site or buying one. Always feel free to contact us at adultsitebroker.com with any questions you may have. 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We have a buyer who's looking for OnlyFans agencies, chatting companies, and OnlyFans traffic sites. He owns one of the top OnlyFans agencies in the world. We're offering a growing free porn gaming site with adult sex games. The site is owned by one of the top entrepreneurs in our industry. We have a premium AI companion platform focused on emotional realism and deep memory. Users interact with lifelike companions that remember every detail, respond with real emotion. They've just added advanced video capabilities. There are more properties for sale on our website. For more information on any of these listings, go to our listings page or contact us at adultsitebroker.com. Now time for this week's interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Stefan Mollbauer of AFPAL. Stefan, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Bruce, thank you very much for the invite after all these years together. Yes, it's great to have you here, man. It's great to have you. Stefan is one of the leading experts on affiliate management. He was the 2024 winner of the Affiliate Forum Awards in the category Best Affiliate Manager and is the author of the Affiliate Management Starter Kit. He also has two podcasts with AFPAL Consultancy. He offers all the services, programs, and networks need to reach the top in their vertical, including HR with AFJobs.com. in addition to training and workflow optimization. Additionally, he tackles the day-to-day challenges as the manager of a program in his role as program director of the dating advertiser Masters in Cash. Recently, he joined the advisory board of the affiliate network and analytics company CatStats.ai. So when do you sleep? That's what I want to know, Stefan. Not too much, but that's okay. I have to say that I embrace the small amount of sleep. I used to think that I maybe have like a problem because I fall asleep very hard and I woke up then also very early and I forced myself to sleep more and that was not good. Now I just sleep like my five hours, six hours per day. And when I wake up, I wake up and I go out of the bed no matter if it's six o'clock or if it's like eight o'clock. And that helps a lot. And I have to say that in all of these projects, I can, besides, of course, the consultancy, I can rely on a very, very strong team. And that makes things a lot easier. And I also forced myself to follow processes that are established. And that takes a lot of chaos away. Excellent. So how can people from outside of the industry get a job in the industry? That is actually the question that I'm really asked the most. And it's not like this phrase people looked on LinkedIn. Recently, a lot of people asked me this and this. No, I think already since like 10 years or longer, since I'm on social media posting a bit about this industry, people are reaching out, either my friends or people that have me there and say like, hey, that looks so cool. I want to do the same. Or people that are already in the industry ask me for their friends if what they can do to join. So there are a few things that can help you. So the first thing is that you learn yourself already a few things before you even start the job search. If you get in contact with somebody and you already know the basics about affiliate marketing, that's already helping a lot. Way, way, way more because it shows the people that you are really interested in joining that and doing the work and not only to join for the party and this chat set lifestyle that we are that we are having then i have to say that it's very hard for a person that is outside of the industry to go for a remote role so that you can nearly kiss goodbye so i would always try to find something local and if you want to work remote and you know a tiny bit of this industry is the best if you are joining a conference. So the majority of people that I know that got a remote role in this industry and they were not from this industry, were people that were taken from their friends to conferences and in that way, they got a position. Which conferences would you recommend the most? So for example, Irina also that is from my team, from the recruitment team, she got the job when she visited Affiliate World. She was there a year before as a hostess. Then the next year, she just joined for the networking events. And I hired her from this. Then my baby mama, she was going to Tess. And she found a job there without being in this industry. Yeah, these are the two that are popping now in my mind, spontaneous. Those are great shows. I went to my first affiliate world in Bangkok, as you know, in December. And wow, what a show, especially for the affiliate space. That's something else, man. That thing is huge. It's massive. It's 7,000 people. It's business-wise. It's next level. Sure. For what I do, it wasn't necessarily a moneymaker, but I learned a lot and I met a lot of people in other verticals and I picked their brains and it gave me ideas on other verticals that I might actually explore. So you can learn a lot there if you talk to people. Yeah, well, then it will become a moneymaker very soon, I hope for you as well. I hope so, too. I got something in mind. I'll tell you about it offline. Why didn't you write a book for people who want to enter the industry? So it was like this. It's actually not only for people that want to enter the industry. I'm convinced that everybody that is already in the industry should read it because it has like, when I wrote it, I was, I think, 13 years in the industry, 13 years of practical hands-on work in this space. So I guess everybody can get something out of that. And there is not too much literature from this space, especially if you look at the affiliate management point of view. There is another book from Florin Simovici, Shootouts to Florin. He wrote it kind of in parallel as me. We even finished our books together. We went on a trip to the mountains because we needed to focus. He wrote a book as well that is more about really running the program or network, so a bit more technical and finance-wise, but mine is more focused on the marketing and sales side. But it was that people were asking me, like we said in the beginning, about joining the industry or once they joined, they all had the same problems. Where I find affiliates, what I do if they are not replying to me, what I have to do on a conference to make it successful. So I realized there is a pattern and that people have all the same questions. And as I'm a person that is very eager to help, as long as it's only taking a few minutes of my work or of my time, I realized that every week I spend five times five minutes answering practically the same question. I said, hey, this is also good for personal branding to write a book. Most probably people were encouraging me to do that. And I did it. I have to say, honestly, it's not something where I earn a lot of money. I sold a few hundred exemplars, but it's $20. It's sold over Digistore, so they take their cut. So it's not that I can live from selling the book. If I break down the hourly rate that I got for writing it, finalizing it, marketing, I would have been better off to clean the toilet. But when I count the business is broad and the boost of reputation that goes most probably in the hundreds of euros per hour just from writing that. So it was a combination of factors. The original idea was to make helping people easier. I'm not even saying like to help people really to make it easier for me to help people. But then the second aspect was also the branding and made me a few thousand years as a nice extra. Absolutely. And, you know, it's kind of like podcasts, you know, you do podcasts, I do podcasts, anything where you're writing, where you're doing blogs, whether you're podcasting, I think that it definitely makes you known as the expert in whatever you do. Plus the fact that I've got the natural talent from being in broadcasting before. Of course, everybody's doing podcasts, right? But for me, it's really a labor of love because I always loved being on the air. In my past, I did sports. Yeah, it's not quite like doing a baseball or football game, but it's pretty cool. And I get to talk to my friends, which is neat. What I want to add here, Bruce, it's also very interesting what you say about or that you bring up the podcast topic additionally, because a lot of people, they start podcasts, but the people, they are stopping because it's not something that is directly rewarding you if you are not like making it super big and you have sponsors behind it. But until that makes money, it takes forever. And you also reach, if you have especially a niche podcast, very soon a level where it's very hard to find guests. Not for me. Yeah, because you are kind of free. But for example, with Afpal, it's very easy. I could have every week somebody. But with Masters in Cash, it's a dating advertiser podcast. And of course, you don't want to have like other dating advertisers there because you cannot put on your own company channel. You cannot put the competition. So that makes no sense. But who wants to speak, of course, on the podcast? It's not the affiliates that are maybe doing some blackhead stuff. It's, of course, the other advertisers. So I came to around 30 podcasts I made there with affiliates, with people that are supplying tech and conferences to our industry. But since around two years, I'm like on a plateau. And I record every year only like two or three podcasts. When in the beginning, I could do maybe sometimes every month one. And that makes it also very, very hard if you are not having a focus on that. And people give that up very soon to make podcasts. There are people that start off very well. And after three, four episodes, they say like, nobody is sponsoring me yet. I didn't get business requests from this. I didn't realize that it's not only the recording that takes maybe 40 minutes. I also have to find the right guest. We have to make some artwork. We have to draft questions. We have to make a pre-talk. So this maybe that is cut down in some cases to 20 minutes. And it's in the end, maybe four or five hours, maybe even two days, plus maybe a few hundred euros if you have a professional editor or like if you film on a conference, a few thousand euros. So that sums up and people give up. Well, this is a pity because some of them are very talented. Yeah, no, I agree with you. Well, just to show that I'm in it for the long haul, this is episode number 309. I don't think I'm going anywhere, man. How long is this podcast running? Well, we've been doing it weekly, so that's over six years now. So it's about six years, yeah. No respect. Thank you. Thank you. Talk a bit about the state of the affiliate industry now. Many people have said, and I've heard them say it, the affiliate model is dead. You're living proof that it's not. Yeah, I think if you go on a conference, we had the affiliate world, there is directly the living proof with 7,000 people that it's far away from being dead. It's just changing. And like in every industry that is processing, and I would say also maturing, because it's a young industry, if you are not adapting, you have like a problem. I don't want to throw this buzzword around too much, but now you have AI, what you didn't have a few years ago. So if you are not implementing that in a certain way, you have a problem. That's, for example, why I'm a partner and advisor at CatStats that is automatizing affiliate programs and networks. The affiliate itself has changed. Think about it. When you were going to test, let's take our home show where we most probably visited the most. When I went there in the beginning, you had like the programs and you had the people that were selling, hosting and God knows what. But then you had all these affiliates that were like one or two people. They were doing SEO. They were sending some emails. Media buying was just at the beginning. There were not even proper callbacks or such solutions for doing that, but people were already doing it on a small scale. Networks also very, very small, especially in adult. But then when you go now, this lone wolf has become really like a minority. Now you have their companies that have like 200, 300 media buyers that are going there. They have own business developers to find new traffic sources, to find new advertisers. This is destroying maybe a small affiliate that is like one person, but it's not destroying the industry. It's just companies taking over a bit what was before one person. But the beauty is still as one person, if you do your job proper and you focus on something, you can succeed and you are, of course, way more agile than like a company. If you go now to a conference and you are a business developer for a big media buying team and you find an offer, you finish your conference, then you write your report, then you send it over to your, I don't know, team lead. Then they check if the offer is good or not. Then they onboard this. Then it's a month. Maybe the hype is over. If you're a single affiliate, you go to a conference, you meet somebody and they say, hey, these are the offers and you like it and it's good and it's something new and hot. You can go directly up in your hotel and five minutes later, the campaign is at least created. So this is the shifts that we are having. Everything got way more professional. And it's fun factor wise, maybe not that much fun as it used to be. But business wise, it's big and it's massive. And if you look at the statistics, how this industry is growing, you see that it's growing and not something that is shrinking. Right, right. How about in adult? Do you feel that the affiliate model is as healthy as it was before? Well, adult took in certain aspects quite a hit. And for example, one of the reasons for this is how AdWords changed. I can speak mostly, of course, from the experience that I have been dating with Masters in Cash. And these guys that were running the review sites on Google, but also sometimes direct, they have all problems to run it as it used to be. That is from regulations, but that is also from price they have to pay. As one falls down, one goes up. So it's not a vertical I'm too familiar with. Of course, it's a play on the market. So you monitor that a bit. And the AI girlfriends, they got in Google something like, I would not say whitelisted, but they are way more welcome there than dating. So let's say if you were looking for like find a girlfriend today, Before it was coming our dating offers and now it's coming some AI girlfriend. That's something where I say like, hey, the market is not getting smaller. It's just shifting and the money goes somewhere else. And it's the same with these fan sites. I'm very sure that the fan sites make the market in general bigger than it ever was. Because people were maybe not okay. They go to a porn site. They see an advertising for a campsite and they go there and they check it out. and they spend maybe even some tokens. But it's a different thing if you find like a creator on social media and you can really identify with what they are doing and you say like, yeah, come on, I make their a small subscription for like 10 bucks a month or something like this. Not even speaking about the hardcore users that are chatting them there a lot and buying special content also. It's shrinking. I think the money is just rotating and growing on a global level with us in affiliation, maybe not having that big of a cut anymore, because if the creator is bringing the traffic, the money is taken out of the adult affiliate ecosystem and put into a more creator ecosystem, but it's still adult. And the people are rotating the jobs and they go from God knows what they were doing, affiliate management, they go to like a creator management, what is also some kind of affiliate management. That's true. And I mean, you know, an adult, Obviously, adults bigger than it's ever been because of the creator economy. The creator economy is a thing all to itself. And that just added on to the membership sites and the cam sites and the dating sites. And now the fan site revenue is huge, obviously, with only fans having most of it. How has the job of an affiliate manager changed in the last few years? So there are two developments. If you are like a big company, you hire a lot of people that are maybe called affiliate managers internally, but they are not. So you have somebody that is like a more hunter focused guy, a more business related guy, somebody that is more in the back office. Then you have this partnership managers. Then you have this data analysts. Then you have this, I would call client success managers. So this is sometimes all like different roles that they summarize under affiliate management. We have that as well in Masters in Cash. So we have, for example, okay, I'm not really doing it that much anymore, but I'm more like a hunter affiliate manager. Of course, I do it also for some partners, but I'm not sitting there and analyzing every partner that I have in and out which landing pages to change and so on working with the creative team to get them banners setting up links and so on so I'm more like the hunter guy then we have for example like a back office guy this guy is not really speaking with the affiliates but he's creating everything affiliate needs so that's more like a back office guy and then we now we don't have her anymore but we had for example an affiliate manager that was like very bad in sales but was the most detailed person in working with them so she was more like a partnership manager and this is something that i see like in bigger companies or not even that big but like at a certain level not only one guy does everything and that it's splitting out and it's with clear defined tasks that are matching your skill set and of course you hire like this or your company develops in that direction but on the other hand you have also this let's say one man shows small programs that has one guy that does everything and this person has to learn a lot of things that were before maybe not that relevant think about it 12 15 years ago the people were not even using callbacks and there was no media buying now this guy has barely media buying now these guys have to know also how to set up tracking They have to know how to read data. Maybe they have to guide affiliates with the design of creatives and so on. So it's either in the small companies, one person has to know more things than ever, or in big companies that you have like a specific specialization. So this is the biggest shift I see in affiliate management. Sure. Yeah. It sounds like it's not an affiliate manager anymore. It's many aspects of the affiliate manager, which is interesting. I can tell you also something from my experience in the recruitment. There was, we are recording this, by the way, end of February. We were having like a lot of requests for affiliate managers. Really, it was just called affiliate manager iGaming, affiliate manager Nutra, and so on. And that has disappeared around four months ago fully. And it was really shifted in this definitions that I said, like outreach manager, data-driven back office affiliate manager. Sometimes they call it in the meantime, even partnership manager or outreach manager. And for example, now in the affiliate manager academy, something that would have been two years ago, absolutely not thinkable about. We have somebody that is not even an affiliate manager. She's a partnership manager, Mila from RedTrack. So she is not finding affiliates, let's say. She's working with affiliates and she makes them their ambassadors. But it's like very similar to a classic affiliate management role, but it's not. It's a partnership manager and the ways of working are very similar. And that's why she's sitting there. She's also cool. Another reason to invite her. But yeah. That's always a good thing. What mistakes do affiliate programs make in their work with their partner? A lot. What are the main ones? I think one of the biggest mistakes that they are doing is to chase new partners. If you are a brand new program or very small, yes, you have to get the new partners in. Otherwise, you have no business you can work on. But usually, the gold is already in your system. When I took over affiliate management or this sales part of affiliate management in Masters in Cash five and a half years ago, they were also like, yeah, okay, let's see who you can bring and you're very well connected and so on. I barely onboarded a new person. I was sitting in front of this dashboard and I was going through it and I found like 200 names or something like this that are like my friends that I worked in the past with. And then I looked at that and I was like, okay, I don't even have to make like a cold outstreet and say like, hey, I work there now. Have you heard about it? I just went there and I said like, I work there now and you have an old account and let's start it. So you don't have to send me traffic. And even if you notice people, if they have already an account, that's double strong. If you have an account and a relationship, one alone is already good, but having both, It's like something you can build on that I see very often also when people are going to the conferences, they send their standard affiliate managers, not their hunting affiliate managers to the conferences and says like, okay, how many new contacts you made? How many big affiliates you found? And they are not even sitting down with the people they are working. That's ridiculous. in any business, your current clients are your most valuable people, both from a standpoint of bringing new business or really more so in my business, referring business. And those two things, you need both. You need them to give you more business if you're in an industry where that's very common like yours, or you need those referrals because referrals are like gold. Yeah, I would say like in our recruitment business, no matter if you're speaking now about candidates or clients, I would say around 50% of it, it's coming really over referrals. Yeah, as it should. Because any established organization should be getting most of their business from referrals. And if you're not, then there's something wrong, either with your approach or with your service. So you need to, it's time to fix something. either get the referrals, ask for the referrals, get the referrals, or do a better job with those people and then you'll get the referrals naturally. Give me some little hacks to improve affiliate management. So what are some hacks? I think an affiliate manager, and now I quote somebody from the Affiliate Manager Academy, Adam from Google Media, a lot of shout outs today. He said the affiliate manager has to be the trust and consultant of an affiliate and i think that is summarizing the job very well an affiliate manager has to of course fight for the business of the of the company and represent their interests but on the other hand the affiliate manager has to be also extremely honest and helpful with the affiliate otherwise he's useless otherwise it's just somebody that is pushing out links and that's something that is extremely important to really understand what the affiliate needs and give on the hand insights and solutions that they would otherwise not have so it has to be a very proactive dialogue to make like really suggestions like hey especially if the affiliate is big but running with you small they are often missing things like hey i see that you are sending to eight landing pages and from this eight landing pages are three not making any sense oh it slipped because i anyway send only 100 clicks to each of them yeah but you have like a conversion rate of 15 so yeah that has already like an effect so provide this kind of insights to them give them a bump proactive if it's really uh deserved affiliates are often coming to you and say like yeah i can scale but I need more money yeah okay go to them and say like hey this source is working absolutely fantastic here you have like a small bump on that that's also helping a lot so these kind of small things are helping really to build like a very strong partnership in affiliate management check in regularly without being annoying when you speak with affiliates and this is now going more into the direction when you have to represent the interests of your company and not the affiliates if you give them something put them to a commitment when they say like hey or you say like hey here are like 10 more but we expect more traffic or they say like hey for 10 more we can send double the traffic you have to speak with them i'm not saying you have to sign a contract to say like hey for this we expect this and this with exactly the same quality because that's a very big problem that people are really sending double the traffic then but the quality turns into a nonsense for example what is a very common trick is also that you give them a bump or you give them access to some secret offers and because they have that now they go to their friends and said like hey i get more than you and i have also this better offer with like one step less in the funnel or something like this you can run it over my account and then you have like all this nonsense traffic before it was review side traffic and now it's coming push traffic in so all these kinds of things so when you make agreements it should be an agreement not just like yeah here is a higher payout and when it's requested this is practically the most basic things that you have in affiliate management that you can do there's so much more also there should be usually in every in every telegram chat nowadays of course with an affiliate there should be also like either a general telegram account of your company that the company owns or like a second affiliate manager this industry is so dynamic people are coming and going so there should be always somebody staying that can pick up the conversation and not starting something new because then all the agreements are lost yeah but your old affiliate manager he gave me like the approval that i can run in cent and nobody can see it anymore because this affiliate manager is maybe gone so yeah these are the small things that you should do absolutely how did data analytics impact affiliate management these days? Well, in this industry, in the end, two very main important commodities, I think is the word. This is attention. So everything that you get in, no matter if you are like an influencer, or if you have like the ads, and the other is data. So these are the two most important things. And based on that, you can build like a nice business. If you don't have data, you are flying blind. Nobody can do so data is extremely important for the affiliate but also the platform the platform has to know the advertiser network has to know which affiliates are performing which affiliates are not performing without data you cannot spot fraud without data you cannot give guidance as i said the affiliate manager has to be the trusted consultant if the affiliate manager is not knowing in detail what is working and whatnot, especially if they have also no context, there is no way to make any guidance. So this is extremely important, but it also has its limitations. I have to say that was showing around one year ago in the dating industry and not only for us, for a lot of people, there was this trend with the sales pixel. So the affiliates that were running on CPL, they were asking to get also the sale report to send better traffic. And that is in general a very good thing. It backfired only in that way because if you have now a source that is creating a lot of sales, especially if it's like first-time payments, you give them like very fast a bump. Wow, you are buying three times more people than usual. So you will make three times more money than usual. So you can afford three times the CPL or double the CPL and you have even more and the affiliate is also happy. So you are giving out all that. So the higher payouts together with this information, what is this affiliate doing? He knows what users are good and they are selling these users on CPL base or CPA base to every advertiser out on the market. So every advertiser has this great result with this affiliate and the users that they are sending. But there are not enough rebills because the user is going through all the platforms and he pays everywhere exactly one time. So sometimes data sharing can be for you as a program or a network also very contraproductive. And to make all this data analytics, you cannot handle this on a scale of an entire program yourself anymore. And that's why I became also a partner of CatSats because this is automatizing everything. So when you are, for example, running a program with a network, actually for networks, even more relevant with 500 offers and you have 5,000 affiliates. it is not possible to manually check which offer should be run by which affiliate, especially if the affiliate is small or an offer is not so crowded. So this tool is practically checking automatically as one of the features, which offers are fitting to which affiliates based on prediction models. A little bit like Netflix, you will also like this or YouTube or Amazon, people that buy this, buy also that. And then it's automatically reaching out to the affiliates with the tracking links, personalized recommendations based on your historical data with us, you should run additionally this, this, this, this, this offers. The affiliate manager don't have to do anything anymore. All the offers that you have in your system are automatically sent to the affiliate manager. And because AI and automation has also its limitations, if you have an affiliate that is making 100K with you per day, and they get like an automatic email, hey, you should run also this, they maybe take it wrong so you have also the option for example to block your biggest affiliates from receiving these messages and instead of that you are receiving these recommendations so you can go to them and say like hey we run we run analytics about what you are currently running and it's already fantastic but i think if you add this offers in the rotation we will have like a great result so that is all data based all ai based and that points in what direction it goes with the future and what I have spotted, especially in the last two months, is that affiliates, they are adding Telegram bots into our conversations. And these Telegram bots are doing the basic communication with us. So these bots are reaching out to us, let's say, automatically once per week or every two weeks and says like, hey, what are the hot offers that we should currently run? It's the most basic thing, but in some way, this affiliate is appearing in front of you. And of course, the real people are also there. So you can communicate with them. And maybe in the future, CatStats has a telegram integration. And the bot is reaching out. This telegram bot from CatStats is then telling them, hey, you should run this, this, this, this. I send you the links directly here. And then some manual person from current point of view will integrate it in their program. Fantastic. That's interesting. What's changed in dating in the last few years? Is it really harder to make money in and why? It's way harder for many reasons. So there are, of course, the regulations and rules. It starts from age verification, but also what I said before with Google making it harder and more expensive to run. That is already one thing. Then you have the situation that the iGaming industry went heavy into traffic sources that we use so they go to tube sites and they are buying the first impressions in the header that is traditionally a good a good source to have like the first impression and they are often doing it in a branding way so they don't even care about performance too much there so that takes away a lot of good traffic then you have the fan sites and the fan sites are 50% based on communicating with this creator. So you have now two options. You have a dating site. Yeah, there are maybe some hookup options and it's sexy. But you have, on the other hand, you have this godness that is willing to speak with you. I speak it now really from a user perspective. Who is really speaking with you? It's a different story. But it's always the illusion that they have. It's also not that there are so many hot moves in the neighborhood. like the advertising is claiming. So that makes it additionally hard. And what comes on top of that, and that is something that I have not even thought about until very recently. It was an article, next shout out, this time to Stas from Leader Private. He wrote a very interesting article about the change of user behavior and how it's affecting dating. So people are used to have like this short dopamine rushes. They are scrolling through Instagram, through TikTok, to YouTube Shorts, to God knows what. And they enjoy something for like 10, 15 seconds. A few years ago, the people, they were sitting and they were reading articles. Now everything has to happen extremely fast. Zuck, zuck, zuck, zuck, zuck. So you cannot expect the user to have like this 15 seconds of attention span or 30 seconds and then go through a funnel that has like eight steps where you have to fill in a big survey. and so on. Go then into the program, go through everything, upload your credit card details, and so on. When I read it the first time, I was like, aha, that is why the young users are not paying. But this is not the entire situation. Also, the older generation is on TikTok. And if they are not on TikTok, they are at least on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook. And they enjoy their this short dopamine rushes as well attention spans are shot yeah attention span is shit that's something from user from user behavior that just has changed but dating is an evergreen it's not the first time that people are saying like this is not working anymore and it survives and survives and survives and what comes additionally and i think then i'm running out of ideas why it's at the moment a bit harder is that it's so easy nowadays to make a dating offer. Back in the days when I started 16 years ago, it was in a dating company. There was like this massive team of programmers and they were doing the dating offers. Nowadays, you can go and buy like a SaaS or a platform for dating for a few K. You pay a small percentage of what it costs you to maintain this platform to them as well. And then you run your own dating offer. And there are many people that have a lot of money. They buy this platform. They run it. They pay a crazy high CPL. They are not even tracking the data. And they are burning money until they realize they lost 1 million in traffic for users they don't even need. And I'm not exaggerating here. And maybe the offer is bad, but this 1 million was taken away from the traditional offers that know how much they can pay. These are the reasons why dating is at the moment harder. But what we did is we shifted a bit away from CPL to ref share. So we are relying more on these people that have big dating lists, that have SEO driven review sites, that have dating blogs and so on. that have like very old white and blacklists. I mean, in a lot of cases, that's not even the right term anymore, but they have like really established sources where they know these are good users and they buy these users for many years and they can send it as media buyers on refship. So when you rely on that, the problems are disappearing. These young guys that are paying a lot of CPL also, they are not connected with these affiliates. The users that are maybe also used to this dopamine rush when they are reaching a long block about dating, they are with their current state of mind okay to go through a longer funnel. You don't have this problem with people that are reselling the best users over and over again. Once it's in your block, it stays there for quite a while, let's say, until you tell them to change the links. Also, the people that are going there, they are not distracted by some iGaming offers and they are really looking for dating and not for creators. because that's again the attention span. They see the creator on Instagram, they click, they make quickly a subscription and that's it. The OF page, it looks very simple and clean. It's not that you have to jump through 50 surveys. You go there, you see the creator, you click, you sign up, you put your payment details and that's it. So when you focus on RefShare, like we are doing it now, the problems get less, less, less, less, less. You leave some business aside when it comes to CPL, but you leave away a lot of volume, but you're not leaving away a lot of margin. So it can be money-wise for your company, even way more healthy. And that's a strategy that we are chasing. And we can chase that because we do it for 15 years. So we have all these connections with these people. Rev. Shear, back to the future. That's where it started. What are the biggest mistakes? I'm going to make this a two-part question. Biggest mistakes companies make when hiring, And what are the biggest job mistakes job applicants make when applying for a job? There are many, many things that can go wrong. And we try in our company to help them to avoid it for both sides. But in the end of the day, the final decision and the final moves are defined by the company and the candidate. There is, for example, already the problem that the companies are delaying their response towards the client to the candidate too long. If somebody is reaching out for a job and they are not having like a crazy good job and they just see something that is even better and they have no pressure, the people need money. So they don't want to wait three weeks until they get an invite to an interview and then have a second and a third interview. And it is really not like something that is like exotic that I say that people have to wait two, three months until this process is over. especially if there is coming something like a holiday in between or like a conference. So it should go definitely faster. Otherwise, the best talents are gone. They are not waiting for you. Then no clear definition of targets and goals. So it's also that the person starts and it's not even defined what they are really expecting from them. They have tasks, yes, but it's not defined what they even need to achieve. Another big problem. And then after one or two months, the problems start. Companies are often not even sure about what type of person they need. These are all like very common problems. And once they found, the biggest problem I keep for the end, and once this person is starting, they start to make the setup of this person. So they speak with their IT. Hey, we need the email address. We need the access to the accounts. That's nonsense. a person that is starting should have from day one everything because otherwise they cannot work and you pay them for two three days and nothing happens and it makes them frustrated and one day if they joined the right company and the biggest issue i see and that's something that i had to discover over all these years in that recruitment field now is that the companies are often trying to lowball the candidate. They get a candidate that is like maybe desperate and accepts an offer that is 20-30% under their market value. And the company can afford them. They just feel like superior that the candidate is desperate and taking that. So you have somebody and the first problem is this person is maybe not motivated because they don't get the money that they are valuable at. That's one thing. But the first opportunity that picks up with the original income they are jumping. yeah good way it's a good way to lose people definitely not not paying them enough yeah the salary or the money that you are paying should be like in a way that um it's fair you should not poker and you should not lowball them if you lowball them you should give them at least a perspective and say like okay for the first three months we can pay you only this and that because in the first three months you will not contribute too much but we know that you have want to have a long perspective so after three months you get like 20% more to match what you are asking for and I think every candidate that is not like a total stupid person will be able to understand that if it's affordable for them some people they they just say like hey without this 500 euros I have a financial problem because I live in Cyprus and my rent is already 1000 so if I have to go now down to 1500 instead of 2000. I cannot even live. So that's a different story. But speaking from a normal situation, the most people have this flexibility to take for three months, a bit of a hit. These are the mistakes that I see from the companies. And now from the candidates, the first thing is that candidates are applying for too many roles that are not fitting them. And that's like a very, very annoying. I have people that are applying like, let's say for 20, 30 roles and they are fitting maybe for one i'm not looking at your series anymore if your name is popping up for everything senior affiliate manager project manager greek language mandatory speaks no greek and god knows what it's like a chaos i have sometimes the feeling that the companies are spinning out their recruitment to us not because they don't know how to find people they spin it off because they don't want to have all this frustration with that guys So that's one thing. Then the next thing is that they are going into the interview and the discussion completely unprepared. Also very problematic. They are going there and they show a very small interest. We have people that are coming like five, six minutes late to the job interview. They are not informing us. They are not informing the candidate. They cancel the meeting census like, yeah, I'm busy. I get back to schedule for something for tomorrow. So we put these people on a blacklist. It's totally understandable that something can happen. You have a job in the view before. It takes five minutes longer than planned. You plan one hour longer. You never know. I think everybody will understand when you say like, sorry, I had a job in the view. I really need to find a job. That's why I was too late for this one here. I really apologize. I like your role and can we do it again? I really make up for that. I think the majority of people, including us, will understand that. But if you have this arrogance, we say like, we don't want to work with this person because this person is like arrogant. That's also a problem. They don't take it serious. And I think the biggest problem that we have, and now we are again back to the money, but the other way around, they ask for too much money. And I'm not saying the guys that are saying like, hey, I was head of sales in this iGaming company. we were making 500 million a year and my salary expectations are 15,000 euros a month. And this is maybe a legit request. I'm not speaking about this people. I'm speaking about especially the affiliate managers that were working in a booming vertical and for one year, they were making, let's say, $200,000. But their fixed income is $2,000. But with all the commissions, they made $200,000. And then their vertical is crushing. they had maybe two affiliates that were running that maybe these affiliates were not even found by them they signed up they had luck they got this guy assigned and of course they were working with them i don't want to down talk this and then this gets banned the regulations are are changing it's a network and they are losing this offer because the advertiser makes their own thing so you are back to this two thousand euros or two thousand dollars so now you're reaching out to me and or to my team or to a company and says, hey, I want to work. And you say like, okay, you are like mid-level affiliate manager, Nutra's trade sale. What is your salary expectations? You are based in, let's say, Spain. So not even the country with like the craziest income level. Yeah, I expect 15,000 euros per month. And you say like 15,000 euros for you do this job for three years. Yeah, but last year I made 200,000. Congratulations. That is like something where you say, okay, why you don't do it anymore? And in the majority of cases, they are not coming with some weird excuses. They really say, yeah, we got regulated. The offers are not available anymore. This year, it's not functioning. So they are aiming for an income of $15,000 when they are worth, I would not say $2,000, but they can ask maybe for $4,000. So they are staying with you in this loop of interviews and applications for jobs that they are too high paid for the qualification or that they are not even out there. So you have to be realistic and you have to adapt to what you are really worth and not what you earn maybe one year in the past. If you made this money for five, six years, that's a different story, even if it's commission-based and the offer is disappearing. But there are really people that made it for exactly one year. Yeah, that doesn't work. Final question. Do we still need to go to conferences? And if so, why? Yeah, definitely. I think it's more important than ever. There are many reasons why this is the case. In our industry, it's everything based on trust. I find an affiliate program or network online. I sign up, I send traffic. How I know that I will really get paid. So if you meet somebody on a conference, the trust level is completely different. Also, the other way around, if you are just having signups in your program or network, first, how you know that this person is legit, not scamming you with fake traffic. But what is even more dangerous is you load your program with a lot of affiliates that never become active but are stealing your time. Somebody signs up, you approve this person, you have calls with them. You generate for them all these links. You analyze data. Hey, based on your traffic, this would work and so on. You spend five hours on this person and this person is never starting. They just were checking in. If you meet somebody on a conference and you sit with them and you shake hands, the chance that this person is starting are way higher. So you invest more time in this person. You give this person maybe direct access to a private offer. You maybe give this person directly a small bump because they say like, hey, we are shifting from this advertiser to this advertiser. They maybe told you this over a beer. So a conference is more important than ever. And you said it in the beginning also when you gave your feedback about Affiliate World. You also learn there. You learn on the conferences a lot. You learn about new trends. You learn about new methods. And you meet a lot of new people. You build a network of people that are referring you. And this is all kind of important. If I would not go to all these conferences, nobody would think on AFPA when it comes to recruitment or affiliate management. And you wouldn't see me, Stefan. That is all like making it more important than ever. Because an AI cannot replace these skills and these possibilities. Also on the conferences, if you have like a little bit of old school sales skills, like you have, I lost it a tiny bit, I have to admit, but I made a podcast with somebody about it recently. The world is your oyster. You can achieve so many things. People don't make follow-ups anymore. People don't even reply to you. But if you go there and you make a proper job and you are the one that is following up, you are the last one standing and you are closing the deal. if they hear five times from you and then you call it a day. A lot of these people have reacted under the first or the fourth time. And I can say that from myself. So we are sending traffic also somewhere else as affiliates over API. And people are reaching out the first time and they said like, yeah, we met on the conference and you wanted to send us traffic. Yeah, okay, I'm not interested. What was this? I cannot even remember that. It cannot be good. And if this person is never reaching out to me again, that's it. The person could have done it in the beginning already better and say like, we were speaking about use and API traffic to our check offer where we have like this new adult dating thing and so on. Aha, okay, this is interesting. If this person is reaching out for the second time, hey Stefan, okay, that's a bit passive aggressive. If they said, hey, haven't heard back. If they say like, hey, sorry, I didn't mention it, but it was about this API stuff. Now you have already my attention. And sometimes they are even saying all this, but we are busy and we are reading the message on the phone and we forget to get back. And then after a while we say like, okay, I really have to have to reply and set things up. So that is only happening if you are on a conference. If you are reached out anonymously like this, you maybe even click on blog. No, I understand. And I'll tell you, I think for me, the conferences are more important than ever, too. So I totally agree. Well, Stefan, I'd like to thank you for being with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk. And I hope we'll get a chance to do this again soon. Bruce, thank you very much for inviting me and having all these good questions. It was a pleasure. It is always a pleasure to talk to you, sir. Indeed. I see you were next. Mabea? No, you'll see me next probably, I would say in Bucharest or Prague. Bucharest or Prague it is. Then thank you. Thanks a lot. See you there. And to everybody listening to this, I hope you have a great day and you could take away something from it. Thank you very much. I'm sure they did. Thank you, Stefan. My broker tip today is part eight of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week we talked about information needed to give the buyer and being transparent with the buyer. Here's more information on what to give to a potential buyer. How well has your content been protected from piracy and what steps have you taken to protect your content? Are you using a piracy takedown or monitoring service? These are important things to know. What promotional tools do you offer to your affiliates? The more tools you offer, the more successful your affiliates will be. What does your traffic breakdown by country? Tier 1 countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia are the most preferred. Add in anything else that will add value to the sale of your property that you can think of, such as what custom scripts do you use? What content management system software is on your site? Do you use billing or affiliate software like NATS? What's your retention rate? How you retain your members is of the utmost importance. How many joins and rebuilds do you have a day? Do you buy advertising? And if so, what kind? Can your content make more money on the DVD or VOD markets? Or have you already tapped into those opportunities? How much did you spend to produce or buy the content that's on your site? What do you believe the content is worth now? We'll talk about this subject more next week. And next week, we'll be speaking with Leandro Kitamura of Protege ID. And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. And once again, I'd like to thank my guest, Stefan Muehlbauer of Affpal. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.
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