I’m really going to hold back and not get to personal with the Traffic Needs Affiliate Network. If you dont already know, they have gone out of business. There really is no need to link to them considering overnight they took their website down. This is one group of people you will want to stay far away from in the future. As a network they failed often times with affiliates awaiting payments for months and just recently they screwed over a ton of networks and publishers by not paying them accordingly.

The lesson to learn is that even C2M had trouble getting payment on time. Unfortunately for them, (an excuse the unprofessionalism), Traffic Needs is filled with a bunch of no-face pussies. I look forward to meeting any of one from that sorry excuse for an ex-company at any event. As a matter of fact, I’m begging for it.

Personal hate aside…

Traffic Needs recently had a couple of offers that converted exceptionally well. First let me start out by saying that the reason they converted well is that they had Domestic Processing on their backends. Anyone that is familiar with domestic processing on the backend already knows that you have to be one of two things to make this work and not get your merchant accounts shut down.

1. Extremely awesome on the backend for support to keep chargebacks down below the ratio threshold.
2. Extremely shady and changing up offers before the chargebacks hit.

Unfortunately what most affiliates dont know, and even more importantly, they didnt understand was that this company with the exception of Gomin (this is my opinion on him) was filled with morons who failed in every previous business they entered thru the parent company of Razor Media. I have to leave Gomin out of this personally because he was the only reasonable person I dealt with and he went to bat for us and got us settled up on a network level.

However, Traffic Needs in whole screwed a ton of my friends, my own publishers and even partner networks regarding payments. They played the game very well at scamming everyone. Unfortunately for affiliates, most NOT All their loyalty lies in who carries what offers. That is a very dangerous game to play. Sure you want the highest ROI you can get but at what price? What good is promoting the best converting offer when there is a possibility of not getting paid?

I almost blame myself. I could have stepped and stated what I really knew. I first had a go at them in the Wickedfire Affiliate Marketing Forum. It’s very easy to see when a company is full of shit however my vision is typically different than 99% of the people in the industry. They may not know what I know and publishers for sure are at the bottom of the totem pole as far as knowing.

My apologies go out to all of those who did not get paid by Traffic Needs. Seriously, a terrible situation. When you have your publishers calling your cellphone, contacting you via LinkedIn and Facebook asking for help on recovering funds, it really says a lot. Had I spoke up sooner, a lot of this could have been avoided.

However…

For all of you I DID warn, (and there’s a lot). I told you this company was bad news. I knew from the very second we dealt with them, they were a sinking ship. Yes, I do think it is crappy you wont be paid but next time you might just pull your head out of your ass and start listening wont you? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether your network is telling you the truth. I know with our publishers, we had competing offers we were trying to put them on to get them away from the Traffic Needs offers. Unfortunately, I think a lot of publishers were thinking we were just trying to get some business from them. I dont have to explain how stupid it was to think that as a publisher do I?

Traffic Needs fiasco and non-payment does all the explaining for me. Affiliate, pull your heads out and pay attention who you work with. I know publishers out over 50K from them and are facing large advertising debts because of this. I cant stress how much moral can be damaged in something like this. I’ve faced it as a pubisher and as a network owner and it can be brutally tough to recover from.

{edit} At this time it looks like the Traffic Needs website is up. Is there still life here?