You must be a really tight team over there. Congratulations on building such a delightful environment, that is capable to bring the deep understanding of how the senior management is dealing with their partners, by your affiliate managers.
I was welcomed with the exact same wonderful attitude by your team when applied not so long ago.
In defense of networks, affiliates do not realize how much fraud is going on in this industry. I would say the average network gets 1 legit affiliate to sign up for every 100 fraudster applications they get.
It's a bitch sorting through it and when the the fraudsters do get through they reek havoc, not only on the network but also on the industry as a whole. Do you realize how much money legit affiliates are losing because of fraud? Payouts are lower, advertisers scrub more, kick ass campaigns are lost, etc. etc. etc.
Any network that puts effort forth in fighting this gets brownie points in my opinion... there are so many that turn a blind eye to it or intentionally let fraud traffic through just so they can try and earn their margin on it and that's worse than the assholes sending fraud. It also costs networks a LOT of time and money trying to prevent fraudsters from getting in to the network, monitoring for fraud on a daily basis and cleaning up the messes the fraudsters leave behind. It's beyond frustrating at points. We have a guy that we caught last month after complaints w/ evidence from several advertisers that had the balls to call me asking where his payment was. Fuck you, that money is staying with the advertiser so they don't take a loss and end up having to lower payouts and screw our good affiliates.
We have a solid system that requires an interview process with references that we verify or a referral from an active & trusted publisher. The fraudsters go as far as calling & aiming my AMs pretending to be the references, submitting several applications in different names creating more work, threatening them, bribing them, etc. We even have No Fraud Tolerance Policy all over our site too.
The worst part is that this is another way that legit publishers suffer because of fraud... they have to go through this BS to get into the network when most networks assume that every app is fraud. Some of the bigger and longer established networks get 100s of apps every day, which I am sure MaxBounty falls in to that category. That is a LOT of bullshit to wade through.
This industry is way too Us versus Them when it comes to affiliates and networks. If you are a solid affiliate that is driving quality traffic you really need to find a couple networks that want to be your partner and not just broker you offers. Build solid relationships with them and they will become so much more than just a place to get offers & weekly payouts from.