So, earlier today—March 17, 2022—I received the email quoted below.
“The HighTechBucks affiliate program will be shut down on April 1, 2022 as the industry is changing.
Address any inquiries to [email address redacted]. Make sure to send an invoice for any outstanding money to get your payment released.”
I find the explanation that “the industry is changing” to be rather brief and ambiguous.
Anyway, this news will probably be mainly of interest to people who run VR porn websites. These are a few of the pornsites that operated within the High Tech Bucks affiliate program: Sexbabes, StasyQ, RealJamVR, All VR, SLR…
The overwhelming majority of the commissions I earned came from referring sales to SexLikeReal.
Probably a year ago or so I removed all of these HighTechBucks links—and warned others—because they had refused to pay findvrporn the money owed. And, the emails had gone back-and-forth. It started out for the first few emails that my invoice “was formatted incorrectly,” and they proceeded to waste a considerable amount of my time having me move the date around on the page while providing cutesy-pie little responses about how I “almost had it right.”
Then it became a case of how they couldn’t pay because I wasn’t “incorporated.” That would make them a one-of-a-kind affiliate program because that’s not a requirement for anyone else (including other programs located in Europe such as VRP or CVR). It was just really interesting how the “incorporated” explanation didn’t become the reason until five or six emails transpired. Then suddenly my email was formatted correctly but the problem has transformed into a question of being incorporated and sole proprietor doesn’t work for them (though it works for everybody else, of course).
Anyway, I guess I don’t need to continue warning affiliates about High Tech Bucks.
Cheers…may “industry changes” shut down everyone who rips off independent projects trying to make it in this corporate milieu.