We got an interesting email on June 10th, about a major company allegedly fucking over hundreds if not thousands of their affiliates. We tried to research further into the subject before posting it but it isn’t always easy to confirm this type of information so we held off on the post ar that time. The letter we received is below.
However that being said, it was confirmed that Penthouse let go their “Digital Business Manager” yesterday (the go to person for affiliates). While this doesn’t actually kill the program, it does, in fact, leave it as a ghost ship.
We reached out to Penthouse two different times to confirm the information for our story but didn’t have any luck getting a response. The former Penthouse affiliate manager didn’t comment as to why she left, only posting on Facebook that she is no longer with them and is seeing new opportunities at this time.
Now, this could simply mean that they are going to outsource their entire affiliate program so they didn’t need anyone in-house but as I said before, we couldn’t reach anyone at Penthouse for a comment, despite our best efforts. I can honestly see them doing something like this after like 18 months or longer of trying to rebuild their program without any luck.
Hey Mike, not sure if you have heard about this yet but there is a major company that has been scamming their affiliates for the last year.
When Penthouse was bought out, they were able to import the affiliates into NATs but their new system wasn’t compatible with their free hosted galleries.
Shit happens man, get it. But when affiliates contacted them to ask about it, they fucking lied and said the old galleries were working fine, which they are only they aren’t tracking your traffic. So any traffic any affiliate sends to the old galleries they won’t get credit for the sales.
All Penthouse had to do was be honest and say hey man, since we changed owners, our new system isn’t compatible so you have to update your gallery links. But instead they decide to lie and now more than a year later those links still aren’t being tracked and they are still lying about it.
I don’t get why more people aren’t fucking talking about this.
I first brought up the issue with Penthouse on January 21, 2016. It’s June of 2017 and they are still having the same issues and still fucking lying about it. Why is nobody outing them?
5 Responses
I don’t know anything other than what is in this article about Penthouse’s affiliate program but I do know the company’s owner is Kelly Holland. A Google search brings up a personal Twitter account apparently maintained by Kelly herself. That is definitely her picture on the account and it has posts (evidently) made by her about the company. The address is @TheKellyHolland. If you have a Twitter account you can contact her and ask her what the hell is going on here. As a legitimate journalist and having done the research it would be more appropriate for you to do so rather than me attempt it not being a legitimate journalist/media reporter and probably not having all of the information about this that you do (I do not know her personally, if I did I might have been more willing to contact her on this matter myself).
We made several attempts to contact Penthouse including calling them, one message through their affiliate program and a direct email. We waited 18 hours, still no response. We can’t make them respond. We asked our questions, those chose not to answer them so we had to go forward with the story.
XXX, I didn’t intend to criticize you for going forward with this article. I apologize if my post was taken in that light. I was just attempting to help you go further with this article and possibly get an answer from someone at Penthouse to update this post with. Embarrassing a company owner over an issue like this one on Twitter can give surprisingly good results at times. There is also a private messaging feature where you can contact her without the contact appearing on her public Twitter feed. I would hope that Kelly is an honest person and is simply unaware of the problem, if she can rectify the issue I would like to see her do so, if she is a dishonest, unethical businesswoman it should be made public. I don’t think that is proven either way as of yet. I doubt she reads this site so it is possible that her underlings have simply hid the problem from her and she has no idea of what is going on in her affiliate program even after you published this article.
Did Penthouse really have a choice but to let go their affiliate manager? I mean they made her tell people for over a year now that everything was fabulous when in fact it was not.
I think if they are going to keep their program they have to revamp from the ground up. What they have now is nothing short of a hot mess that serious affiliates are smart enough to avoid.
Rumor is people aren’t getting paid, nor have they been for awhile. We know the old FHG links are all dead. But whoever wrote this letter was correct. When you asked Penthouse (Rhonda) about it, they flat out lied to your face and said no everything works great. They should have never lied. They should have been honest with us right from the start. A little bitching here and there over having to rebuild gallery links is a lot better than finding out you’ve been lied to for over a year. It’s a slap in the face a huge violation of our trust.
The sad truth is, Penthouse is a great brand and it could be great once again. But I don’t honestly know that their affiliate program will ever recover.
Would you be willing to trust a company, any company – again after being burned?