Is there any way to find out how much a competitor earns?

[MrMax]

My competition for a site I'm working on has been around for a long time and does their processing through CCbill. I'm *Dying* to know how much they earn, so I can see what the potential is for me.
Is there any way to get any clues as to the kind of income they make?

[gaydemon]

No not really, the only thing you can do is to look at Alexa or similiar sites and get a rough idea about their size. In the end of the day, most income in this business do come down to Traffic. Of course it does matter what you do with it it, but still its the single biggest factor.

[gaybucks_chip]

I wouldn't look at your competition as the indication of what's possible; to a large extent (unless it's a really obscure niche), what's possible is what you make possible through your own hard work.

There are some seemingly tiny sites/companies that have thousands of members but never talk about it, and sites that openly brag about having thousands of members that would have to drop a zero or two to get an accurate member count :)

Almost any niche is, theoretically at least, good for 1000-2000 members if it's extremely high quality and aggressively marketed. Some of the more popular/larger niches can have 5000-10000 members, and a few have 15-20,000 or more.

So the sky is the limit :)

[nickbaer]

I think an interesting measure of a competitor's success is when you read here that they bounced a check, or were late with a payout.

[abostonboy]

I think an interesting measure of a competitor's success is when you read here that they bounced a check, or were late with a payout.

That just tells you that they fucked up somewhere. Hardly a measure of success. I have had some big companies both be late and bounce checks.

Everyone makes mistakes, including the lady in accounting that got the $200,000 wire to the bank to pay affiliates for the week wrong.

[nickbaer]

Can I give her my account number" :)

Actually, I am thinking about cleaning house on the sponsor programs on my site :

http://dudelodge.com/images/affiliateCCBill.php

Got any suggestions? :)

[abostonboy]

Can I give her my account number" :)

Actually, I am thinking about cleaning house on the sponsor programs on my site :

http://dudelodge.com/images/affiliateCCBill.php

Got any suggestions? :)

Can't say I do. You might want to put a title on that page however. Untitled never does that good in Search Engines.

[xstr8guy]

Is there any way to find out how much a competitor earns?

You could always ask. ;)

You'd be surprised how much information someone will disclose.

[AlexManifestMan]

One BILLLLLLION dollars. Of course after taxes, that is only $500,000,000 this year. Or did you mean on the website WITHOUT the income from the laundry-mats?

[basschick]

a bounced or late check doesn't mean a thing except that the check bounced or was late. some of my most successful sponsors have had things like that happen:

i had a check bounce once from nastydollars a few years ago. it bounced because their bank suggested as a security measure that nastydollars send a list of all the people who were receiving checks each week, and they accidentally skipped our name. we also had late checks once from naughtyamerica, who is going even stronger and has sent us many ontime checks since those late checks. both these sponsors have paid us on time for years after those issues.

these are only a couple of the sponsors who have had issues that had nothing to do with their financial status but rather related to other issues.

when you're unable to get hold of a sponsor with payment issues, that's when i start to worry. and in one case, it turned out that a new spam filter was throwing away my emails and it took a phonecall to discover the issue.


I think an interesting measure of a competitor's success is when you read here that they bounced a check, or were late with a payout.

[HunkMoneyLuke]

Don't worry about how much competitors make, focus your energy on getting your own earnings up instead.

[MrMax]

Don't worry about how much competitors make, focus your energy on getting your own earnings up instead.

its good for motivation to know how much my competitor makes. like a carrot in front of me