stusmithmusic Posted August 16, 2022 Share Posted August 16, 2022 This was mentioned in another thread which went a bit wayward (for unrelated reasons) and was closed down so I figured I'd start a new one so I can respond to feedback and maybe get some more. So here's the news... We have just gone public with a beta of our new Plugin Reseller Price Check service on plugindeals.net. Whilst this is pretty complicated under the hood with automated daily site scraping connected to a huge database which is then sorted and updated on the site twice a day, the front end is pretty simple to use. It's basically a list of thousands of products along with their current prices at a number of top resellers. The list can be very quickly filtered by category, developer, or product name. It's still in beta as there is still some manual work to do connecting the reseller data up to the main product list and removing duplicates, among other things. But it is mostly in a good place. There are caveats, as with all any service like this, such as the fact that prices are in USD and may change when converted to your local currency. There are also differences in taxes depending on where you are. The data also takes at up to 24 hours to get up-to-date so new price changes may not appear immediately. The list is not intended to be used in isolation and works best alongside the ULTIMATE Plugin Deals List and more community based deal-finding options like our Deals and Freebies Facebook group and our newplugindeals subreddit. Myself and my little team of developers are working on ironing out the kinks and there are also some cool new features we plan to add that this system opens up to us. So keep an eye out for those. 🙂 Please check out our our Plugin Reseller Price Check service and let me know what you think! I'll respond to some of the feedback from the other thread below shortly. Thanks! ❤️ 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stusmithmusic Posted August 16, 2022 Author Share Posted August 16, 2022 @mibby spotted some incorrect pricing on Best Service. Looks like this has disconnected and will be fixed asap. I'll be setting up personal alerts to let me know if a dealer's data isn't updated for some reason so this won't go unnoticed in the future. Thanks! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stusmithmusic Posted August 16, 2022 Author Share Posted August 16, 2022 @PavlovsCat made some great points about the nature of these services and how the whole affiliate thing influences their approach. I agree and actually have a bit of a love/hate relationship with affiliate marketing. From one side, it's a great way for creators to earn a few pennies from their work, which is how I came to it after starting the home studio blog that preceded Audio Plugin Guy. From the other side, there are many out there who are only in it for the money and set up services that claim to help you find deals but almost exclusively spam you with affiliate links. Or put out glowing reviews for substandard products just to get their cut *ahem MIDI chord pack reviewers ahem*. Those guys bug me! The approach I take with Audio Plugin Guy and plugindeals.net is to put the service to our community first. So, whilst you will find affiliate links for Plugin Boutique and others amongst our deals lists, we aim to share all the deals we come across, which includes offers direct from devs and exclusives at non-affiliated resellers. The APG reviews are for products that excite myself and our writers, and therefore hopefully our readers. I also like to help highlight new indie devs. Affiliate stuff doesn't come into those decisions at all. So hopefully I come down on the right side of the line with all that. 🙂 For the record, affiliate commission is "ok" across all the stuff we've got going on but most goes to covering hosting, paying for the database and automation services that keep everything running, and paying writers and coders. I certainly couldn't make a living from it (not with a house and two kids, anyway!) and rely on my "real" job for that. ❤️ 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted August 16, 2022 Share Posted August 16, 2022 (edited) @stusmithmusicI think as long as you're disclosing it and not doing BS reviews, it's fine. Even better if you're also including deals where there is no affiliate marketing relationship. I'm in your Facebook group and always liked the way you operate. As I mentioned, I've led digital marketing at some large brands including affiliate marketing, and used to have a publication and major book deal where I wrote on such matters for marketing professionals leading these programs. So I certainly have opinions on the topic! Back when I was writing on this topic, I stopped short of writing a piece I contemplated on how affiliate marketing and influencers changed marketing ethics forever, in a very negative way. Every brand doing affiliate marketing spends a lot of money on people selling/shilling their products, it's reality. Brands have long been doing the same thing with major celebrities. For instance, for a movie or TV star, you give them a bag with $60,000 or more in gifts to hawk your brand goods and sometimes it might save you millions on product placement fees in movies (leading stars will get to demand a product they want is featured in a shot). These days every affiliate marketer, like the influencers doing YouTube "reviews," if they disclose affiliate marketing relationships at all, will always downplay their affiliate revenue and say it has no influence in their reviews or attention they give things, which is a complete lie -- if it is, reject the money. It has a major influence, and as you noted, one of the impacts is that little guys who aren't giving out cash don't get reviewed or listed at a deal site -- especially when their competitors offer affiliate money and the little guys don't. But I really wouldn't have gone down that path and shared my opinions so candidly if another deal site guy competitor to you didn't post in my thread that mentioned your group (and someone else then mentioned your site) to self promote and then harass and bully another forum member. That's a huge line in the sand for me. I won't sit by and allow people to be bullied. I'm in your deal group and you are consistently a class act who always has operated fairly, decently and in a kind manner towards others. I appreciate how you treat others, even more so since yesterday when I saw the behavior of one of your competitors. I'm not going to name him here, but he ended up sending me a bunch of PMs that nullified his mea culpa in my thread and I imagine I may be next on his list. So again, I don't think this guy would engage in that mean-spirited, ugly behavior if not for being motivated by making a buck. Unfortunately, greed brings out the absolute worst in some individuals and others can run a business and still maintain their ethics, which I believe is the case with you. Okay, sermon over. Edited August 16, 2022 by PavlovsCat 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stusmithmusic Posted August 16, 2022 Author Share Posted August 16, 2022 @PavlovsCat I appreciate your kind words and I'm glad you like the way we run things in our communities... it's definitely had to evolve and adapt over the years as we've grown and I still feel we could do better to make valuable, friendly places to hang out. I've had run-ins with a few other affiliate guys, not including the chap from the other thread, and there are definitely a few who go about things in ways I do not agree with at all. I did actually touch on it in a blog post I wrote a while back where I came close to giving it all up but instead decided to just focus more on the things that mattered and delegate a bit more so I didn't burn myself out! On which note... I'm off for a little vacation. (Though I'll still be around, as always!) ❤️ 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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