Why Remove Inactive Affiliates?

[Clay_P]

As you know, many affiliate programs remove inactive affiliates if they are not making sales or getting any traffic.

I wonder why they do that? As it doesn't cost them anything if an affiliate is not active.

I researched for it but found articles that oppose removing inactive affiliates and say that you should not do that. But no one has mentioned why they removed affiliates in the first place.

 

[AugustinH]

I think the platform can help them instead of removing them. They can provide inactive affiliates with the tools they need to motivate them. I do not know what is the reason behind removing inactive affiliates.

 

[Graybeard]

It's normal to prune "dead wood"

I used to prune customers that hadn't made a purchase after a few years.

With regard to affiliates: >70% of signups never act (send referrals or produce any sales) --they can always sign up for an account in the future.

What you fail to recognize is the cost of marketing to and attempting to manage a large number of inactive accounts. Including database look up times for each event that is recorded --This 'bulk' slows down the whole process in real time for active affiliates and referral conversions, dashboard stats and accounting.

 

[ApproachX]

In this case - it`s nothing personal and just business. Both parties are interested in mutually beneficial relations. Networks could close not active affiliate accounts (with a warning about it of course) and concentrate on a win-win strategy with involved partners.

 

[thelegend]

Yea me also i dont understand why thy do that because they dont lose nothing if they let them active and it dont hurt theyr business at all

 

[Graybeard]

That's because you never had to run a racks of just database servers for a real internet domain.
The load matters at that scale. Dead weight (read: inactive) gets backed up and compressed then moved to a little used storage server.
Then the usernames are pruned (read: Deleted) from the production database servers and their RAID mirror images.

We used to delete free signup accounts that never upsold to paid in after 90 days so they didn't leach resources and video bandwidth.
But that was our case use.

Someone like social media uses their membership metrics as a valuation tool --for ad sales and stock value KPI metrics. It's to their advantage to includ all the dead wood and bots. See: Elon Clown-shoes and Twitter Tw**s current conflict --if you need an example.

Affiliate programs are notorious for signups that never attempt to send referrals, after a period of time that is just dead wood and distorts your overview of productivity. If those never active accounts do exist: you need to write a query to render a report that will exclude them. That query has to check each name in the database before it can output the query's report results. So, why is that server so slow

You don't understand how database servers work at all. The number of lines affects the query time to output a result.
If your affiliate ID was a simple 34512304 <-(number) your login time would be much, much less not 5 or 10 seconds. The more connections there are to a database the slower it becomes. If accounts were all numbers the query times would be a lot faster. Numbers are 2-bits up to 65535! Word type encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units. Much slower data to query.

So, enjoy your waiting to log-in and understand JUST WHY it took 5 or 10 seconds ...