... negative weight bonus?

[disgust]

logged in and found this under my referral bonuses...

Jason Larson 450
Richard -2,100

1,800 Base + -1,650 Bonus = 150 Total Weight

[digitalpoint]

Hmmm... that's interesting... I'll have to check how someone even got a negative weight. But at the very least, I'll put a minimum weight of zero.

[disgust]

yeah, assuming I got 10%, he had a negative 21,000 :)

[digitalpoint]

Okay, got it fixed...

[schlottke]

What was the problem?

[digitalpoint]

I was updating something in the validation code, and a line got commented out (totally my fault).

[chachi]

Do you get BW bonuses for signing up additional sites of your own?

[digitalpoint]

Yeah, but it's pointless because the weight bonus comes FROM the site you signup, so you end up with the same total.

[disgust]

so you'll have more weight if you don't sign up with a ref than you would if you do? that's a bit odd.. though I guess it does prevent abuse

[digitalpoint]

Correct... making weight bonus appear out of thin air would lead to lots of abuse and artificial bonuses being generated. If you have any better ideas on how to do it, it's open for suggestions. :)

[thebassman]

I was wondering how that worked... thanks for the clarification, Shawn. ;)

[thebassman]

Correct... making weight bonus appear out of thin air would lead to lots of abuse and artificial bonuses being generated. If you have any better ideas on how to do it, it's open for suggestions. :)

Just thought of something, as I signed up my first referal to the network - what if the 10% extra was taken from the network as a whole instead of the person that's signing up, that way there's no negative impact on people signing up via referals?

For instance, say there are 10 people on the network, all with a weight of 1000 (to keep it simple). And 1 guy signs up 1 more person. The total network weight would be 11,000. New guy would have a weight of 900, where as the guy that referred new guy would have a weight of 1100.

Under my proposed system, the guy who referred the new guy would still have a weight of 1100, but everyone else would have a weight of 990... So it rewards the people that refer, but doesn't really take away from anyone in a significant way, but only further encourages people to refer so to not have a lesser weight...

Did that make sense? (It's 3:40am here, so it might not have... if it didn't, let me know, and I'll clarify in the morning... hehe).

[digitalpoint]

So for every 10 referrals you make, you want to have 100% of the entire weight of the network? :)

Plus, what if you were referring people with a tiny weight that brings no value to the network? Seems like an easy way for people to setup their own mini site and instantly gain 10% of the entire network value as a "bonus". :)

[kaptain]

if it's not broke then don't fix it. :)

[thebassman]

No, no, no... you misunderstood me, Shawn... not 10% of the whole network... the exact same 10% you would have taken from the person that was referred, but instead of that person loosing out on 10%, it's spread out across the network... are you following me?

[digitalpoint]

Wouldn't that give bonus to everyone on the network then even though they didn't refer anyone?

[thebassman]

No... let me try to explain again. I'll try to use more realistic numbers as well. Let's say there are 200 members in the network currently, all with an average of 5000 weight points, therefore giving the entire network a value of 1M. For the sake of the example, let's say everyone has the exact same weight to start @ 5000. Now, 1 person gets referred to the network (who also has a site with weight 5000. Now, the network has a weight of 105,000 right?

Now, the referrer (call them person A), gets a 10% bonus based on the weight of the site of the person who was referred (call them person B). There for person A now has a weight of 5500, right?

In the system we currently have, those 500 weight points would come from person B and given to person A, leaving person B with 4500. The part about the current system that sucks is person B could have signed up without the referral and would have received 500 more weight points.

My suggestion is take that 500 points away from the pool. So person A will still have 5500 points, but person B, along with everyone else in the network will give up a couple points (~2.5) giving each person in the network 4997.5 weight points... so instead of the person that was referred being penalized, the entire network received a very small penalty for not referring someone...

Does that now make sense?

[digitalpoint]

Yeah, it makes sense, but seems like a bad idea to penalize people for not referring.

[thebassman]

But isn't it better than penalizing people for being referred? Plus, the weight being taken away from the pool is negligable when looked at on a per account basis (plus this way it encourages people to refer more people to the network).

[nadlay]

Shawn,

What would happen to a site that registered through a referral that only had 1 page in Google, even though there may be more pages awaiting indexing?

[disgust]

I've signed up with sites like that, they seem to get a weight of 2.. of course, though, that increases when more pages are indexed

[nadlay]

Ok, I'll probably sign it up as is then. I was going to wait until a few more pages were indexed first.

[thebassman]

Yeah, it makes sense, but seems like a bad idea to penalize people for not referring.

I don't want to sound harsh, but don't you think it needs to be addressed/changed? I'd feel bad about taking away weight from people I refer... :(

[Nitin M]

throwing my $.02 in the mix ...

I also really dislike how the referral bonus is subtracted from the refered account. I can't imagine clicking a link to buy something online, for example, and getting charged MORE because I went through the affiliate link. And, not only does it seem odd to punish the new account, it also seems that is a huge incentive for anyone that was referred to create a new account and move their domain to the new account to recoup the 10% penalty.

I don't understand why there has to be a matching reduction in weight to offset the weight bonus.

Why can't it just be that the referring account gets the 10% bonus and noone pays a penalty --- not the referred account and not the network.

Yeah, I'm not a math moron and I know that the mathematical effect of this is that a tiny fraction of weight is reduced from each network member. BUT, the entire weighting system is not a zero-sum equation anyway. The weight is only used to determine probablity of displaying your links so giving a slight edge to accounts based on their referrals seems to make sense and shouldn't require such a large penalty for the referred account.

A final thought ... there are caps on the weights for each site and I know I have sites that would otherwise blow through the cap and I know many other members have large sites in the same situation... so... it would seem there is already excess weighting that is unaccounted for. My point with that is just that I don't think the numbers have to add up exactly for it to still be "fair".

[thebassman]

Yeah, exactly. :D

[nadlay]

I'd feel bad about taking away weight from people I refer... :(

I agree.

There have been a couple of people I have refered to the network, and I told them to go direct.

I did this because I felt that I would be stealing from them by having them use my referral number, and thus have their weight reduced.

[thebassman]

Yeah, and therefore I think this would be a good thing to be addressed in future builds/version of the network...

[GuyFromChicago]

I'll take the opposite side of the line here…I'm fine with how referral weight is distributed.

It's really no different than a salesman who earns commission - the customer is paying that salesperson's commission as part of the deal. The salesman brought the product/service in question to the customer's attention and deserves a little compensation for their efforts.

No different here. You (the affiliate) is telling someone about the network…without you they may never find out about it at all. If given a choice of not knowing about it at all, or giving up some of my weight as a way of saying "thanks" to the person who turned me on to the network, I'll give up some of my weight any day.

I already did as a matter of fact, I signed up both my accounts under the person who originally told me about thew program vs. signing up under myself or going direct.

Just my 2 cents.

[disgust]

I also don't think it's a huge deal- it's not like people would really notice it, anyway.

[digitalpoint]

The biggest issue for me is that it allows for people to generate free weight with their own sites. If there was a way to keep people from referring their own sites, then that would be fine, but I don't know of a way to prevent that.

[thebassman]

Hmmm... well, if people could only sign up with 1 account, that would lessen it, I guess... (kinda like google adsense)...? and have all their site under 1 account...?

[lorien1973]

What is a good base weight? I signed up the other day and got a base weight of 22,500. I put the ads on my empty advertising slots on the interior pages in some decent locations. Other than referrals, is there other ways to increase the weight?

It looks like my ads got approved, so I assume I'm in rotation now; is there a way to find out how many times (sites) the ad is active?

[chachi]

uh, that is good. Most decent sites (size and PR) probably are in the 5k to 10k range, with the vast majority of sites probably being much less than that.

[disgust]

What is a good base weight? I signed up the other day and got a base weight of 22,500. I put the ads on my empty advertising slots on the interior pages in some decent locations. Other than referrals, is there other ways to increase the weight?

It looks like my ads got approved, so I assume I'm in rotation now; is there a way to find out how many times (sites) the ad is active?

that's a very nice weight. the easiest way to increase weight is to refer people or add the coop ad network ads to other sites

[GuyFromChicago]

You can also add more pages to your exisitng site. More pages = higher weight until you hit the page weight cap.

[lorien1973]

I think someone here got credit for me joining. I clicked over from SEO chat from someone's link

I added the link to every page on my site (well, where it was easy to do, I'm pretty lazy). the interior pages run ads in 2 spots - my empty ad slots. Top left and page middle. Home page, just top right. If my yahoo stores would let me run php scripts, i'd have them on more of my sites. I think its a great concept. I'll be interested to see if it helps my SERPs.

How many ads do some of you run? I only made 4 - 1 for each of my sites.

[MammaRose]

logged in and found this under my referral bonuses...

Jason Larson 450
Richard -2,100

1,800 Base + -1,650 Bonus = 150 Total Weight


How was this fixed? I have a negative weight referral bonus.

Did shawn have to look at it?