On Tuesday, Jan 14, 2003, at 04:16 Canada/Eastern, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
After following the hundreds of e-mails on this subject, I get the feelingBill, thank you! I can't believe people are treating this as a make or break issue.
that there is an assumption that the referral list is a really great
thing, and by being on it opens some floodgates of customers flocking to
your site. Well, I hate to break the bubble, but in the real world, that
just isn't the case. The referral list just isn't all its cracked up to
be, or at least assumed to be by the ones "not on the list".
I say trash the referral list concept. It's useless. Instead provide
some type of "seal" for the reseller's who want or for some reason need
third party confirmation that they really are a tucows reseller...
Think of the implications of every reseller being on that list, and it suddenly becomes much less attractive to participate on it (I don't want to be listed beside "Joe-Bob's Domain Speculators Inc"). And I'm sure traffic generated from referrals on this list are non-trivial, but I'm also positive it's not as fruitful as people seem to think it is. It's a snark hunt.
Furthermore I don't think it's fair that anyone demands that Tucows pour all these resources into developing a system that will send resellers probably less than 100 page-views a month. I don't think anyone has any non-anecdotal evidence that the referral list is any type of gold-mine AS IS, never mind if we add every reseller to the mix.
Remember people that OpenSRS is a supplier of a wholesale product, and a good one at that. Wholesale domains without a lot of song and dance is a pretty valuable service already, I'm not looking for some sort of free advertising from them to supplement that.
I wonder if those who are "re-thinking their relationship" with OpenSRS over this matter have considered what these types of arguments would get them at any of the other RSPs? Jack all, and maybe less.
Now to set up my "Referral List -> /dev/null" filter...
