ShareASale or DarkBlue?

[Guava]

I want to expand my affiliate program to other networks. Currently the program is available at FineClicks but I would like to expand to either ShareASale or DarkBlue. Which would be better? Which one is larger?

I've heard lots of good things about ShareASale but I haven't heard much about DarkBlue. I started thinking about DarkBlue after seeing their advertisement here in the village.

[joetec]

Dark blue has a $500 minimum deposit and requires you to have at least $500 in your account for each month.

Q. What do I pay?
A. You will only pay the amount you decide to pay an affiliate for a lead or sale. There are no additional costs involved with advertising through Dark Blue. You are required to keep a balance with Dark Blue at all times. Dark Blue will process payment to affiliates from this balance. Initially, a minimum deposit of US$500 is required. Each month you will need to have either $500 or your average monthly spend in your account, whichever is greater.

Shareasale's minimum deposit is $50.

So unless you can spend this kind of money I'd go with shareasale.
But darkblue looks like it could provide more sales because it claims to have 1 billion monthly impressions.

[Guava]

Where did you find that on their site?

In their terms on located here it simply says

11.1 The minimum amount required to open an Advertiser’s Account shall be $100.00, unless otherwise agreed to in writing by Dark Blue ("the Minimum Opening Amount").

11.2 At all times after opening an Advertiser’s Account, the Advertiser must maintain a minimum account balance of $50.00, unless otherwise agreed to in writing by Dark Blue ("the Minimum Account Balance").

Anyway I was also surprised by how DarkBlue generates income. They do not charge a % of the CPA paid to affiliates but instead they launch exit consoles after a visitor is sent to your site (from the affiliate) and then split that income 50/50 with the advertiser. That's a very different revenue model then ShareASale and FineClicks. Does anyone have any experience with this or could show me an example?

[Czar]

Originally posted by Guava
Does anyone have any experience with this or could show me an example?

I had the pleasure of touring DarkBlue's offices late last year, where the system in question was discussed and demonstrated. Externally, the process merely results in a single popunder being spawned as a surfer moves from the affiliate's site to the merchant's landing page. The popunder does not compete directly with the merchant, as this would be self-destructive for the network, but rather provides the surfer with access to related resources drawn from the Roar and Pageseeker PPCSEs (which are also owned by Dark Blue Sea).

For example, were a visitor to click on a link for a dental affiliate program, a popunder would immediately spawn. This popunder would contain links to health-related search terms in an effort to increase legitimate usage of Dark Blue's search engines, without prompting anti-competitive comparisons to the ilk of Gator, and without distracting the visitor with invasive advertising that is totally unrelated to his or her sphere of interest.

I'm not sure how the economics of the system will survive if and when the usage of pop-blockers increases, but it's not a bad trade-off for the time being.

[EMINEM79]

With shareasale, your offer is gonna be buried in amongst many other ones. Unless you pay to get featured or something, I wouldn't expect too many leads.

I know nothing about darkblue

Dave

[shareasale]

I would disagree with the comment about being "buried" in our network.....True, we do have over 500 offers available....but the organization of these offers, along with the capability of searching by keyword and product...and as you mention, "Featured" rates that start as low as $60 (although very popular due to low price) make the offers very capable of being found. We've taken a lot of suggestions/etc.. about the organization of the offers, so if you have any specific things you would like to see to improve it further, please let me know...

Also, as i've said before...I don't think the network should be thought of as the magic wand for finding partners/affiliates. It is true that if you have a quality offer, our network, along with many others, will find you a good number of affiliates to work with....However, those merchants who do their own research on potential affiliates, along with good communication with current affiliates - will have the most success....

Guava - PM or email me brian@shareasale.com, about your offer...

[DarkBlue]

You can view an example of how the pop under works here.

http://www.darkblue.com/advertisers/example/

Can I suggest that you join both networks. I think you'll be happy with both companies

[shareasale]

I agree with that DarkBlue...placing a program on both networks will give you the best of both....

By the way, next time I'm in Brisbane...I want one of those famed tours that Czar got of the DarkBlue offices. I hear it comes with a free lunch.

[DarkBlue]

For our International guests we have dinner and drinks

[ktvktv]

not much info about becoming an advertiser in darkblue.
I am confused about darkblue web site
bad web site design in my point of view. (don't get mad . I am telling you how I feel)

I am a CJ advertiser and I am looking for other options to advertise ....
I think I will go with sharesale

[firstmark]

I find the one billion impressions a month for darkblue a bit high.
If they serve that many ads how come I have never seen one before?
They must be using their ads on sites they own themselves I imagine to come up with that figure.

[DarkBlue]

Hey firstmark,
you are not too far off the mark

We do send some of our own traffic through the network but I don't see this as a bad thing.
I'm almost certain you will have seen one of our ads as we have had independent third parties asses our market reach at 7% of the internet population each day.

I’m sure once you know what ads to look for you will begin to notice us more and more.

[kamsoon]

I don't know why but DarkBlue does not work well for me.

May be their offers are not converting well or my subscribers doesn't like to sign up their stuff or I am stupid in selecting the offers.

Alson.

[TDNetworks]

I'm with shareasale as a advertiser now and it is doing good. I would become a advertiser with darkblue but that $500 is making me hold back some since I don't want to put money into it and get no leads like I did with fineclicks.com.

[Strider]

We are testing out one of our Niche Shopping offers on Dark Blue and although it's only be a few days, it's been a good test so far. The setup was easy as long as you have the creative they require when signing up and every email we have sent them was answered fairly quickly.