Mind Torn Apart By Wins and Losses
By Bryan May

Feng Kuang, translated from Mandarin to English to, “mind torn apart by wind,” could describe a great many of us in the affiliate network industry.  It could describe many in the world as well, not limiting ourselves to affiliate talk, but rather to talk at large.  Talk throughout the universe of minds being lost is rampant, but there are few industries that lend themselves to fostering this particular brand of mind-tearing.  ADD, OCD, ADHD, and all combinations therein are present in nearly all of us.  Look around your office.  It’s like vampires at night, friends.  You have been bitten.  Everyone is playing the smiley face, or the angry face, or the “I’m too busy to talk to you” variety, but most of their tears are growing deeper by the minute.  If you could crack their craniums, you’d find all sorts of mental intangibles, and a psychiatrist would have endless fun diagnosing side effects of an industry where I readily accept conference calls with potential “huge affiliates” at 2am, only to wake up at 6 because “Master Pub Monster” only does his business in the early morning.  As my work load increases, I am furthering my inherent scatterbrained nature, and before too long, these entries will max out at three sentences.  Rather, I could in fact scramble through pages of incoherence, but that doesn’t really do anything for anyone.

We had an affiliate sign up the other week with a slight derivation of “fengkuang” as their name.  I wanted to approve them, not even knowing the meaning at the time of signup and assessment.  The meaning only revealed itself through a new friend, said girl of an entirely different industry, who speaks a speck of Mandarin.  However, list name was www.yahoo.com, and that’s when I became slightly suspicious.   “Is this one of those pubs that will use, ‘Brad Pitt erection in your VCR’ as a subject line for Blockbuster?,” I thought to myself.  Aha!  Joker, I am.  We never had Blockbuster on email, so please, network of trustworthy nature, please do not ping me upon reading this entry.  Anyway, I flash-forwarded ahead to the conversation I would be forced to endure with my favorite education or mortgage advertiser when “mind torn apart by wind” was activated by “Bryan torn apart by manager,” and that’s when I decided against it.  Despite my affinity for the common windblown man, and my greatest efforts to rally behind anyone torn apart by anything, the “hotmale” email address and “yahoo” scene scared me too much.  Actually, it didn’t scare me too much, because I still called the phone number.  Disconnected.  I see.  Terminated.  But I didn’t do it happily.

Ideally, no one at eMarketMakers is reading this and wondering why the hell their CPA Manager is spending their time calling obviously fraudulent publishers.  Truth is, this is the definitive industry of uncertainty.  I’ve had guys of similar suspicion who turned out to be hiding behind a suspect name, when in actuality they were legitimate heads who were wearing a moniker mask to conceal their identity.  You go ahead and call the guys who look like a an all-around reach and waste of time, and they turn out to be homeboys entrenched in collecting opt-in data for the last five years, exact in their art and fully canspam compliant.  And it takes a total of 60 seconds to click, evaluate a profile, and call a disconnected number.  Sure, I could’ve taken that 60 seconds to take a bite out of my three-hour old sandwich, or to chat with one of the wanderers, but I’d rather take my sacred minute and get blown.  By wind.  Of the mind.  Do I have somewhere to be tomorrow night?  I feel like I do.  The weeks and Digital Moses Confidentials and international-traffic driving publishers pile up, but the forward progress is not always achieved.  How many affiliate networks are in existence, anyway?  100?  200?  2000?  Not certain, really.  The way things are headed, I wouldn’t be half surprised if fengkuang called me tomorrow asking if I wanted to join his network.  Then we’d enjoy a conversation about his education offer that you can incentivize and his recently acquired and coveted Blockbuster email campaign with featured subject lines of “Natalie Porksmen in your living room.”  Bryan’s mind- in your living room.  If you want it to be.

 

 

Bryan Mayy
bmay@emarketmakers.com