Does anyone actually get a payout bump for asking, or is it purely volume

I have eleven rate changes on record across four networks going back to 2022 and I cannot find the rule that governs them. So I'm going to put mine up and ask for yours, because the folk wisdom on this board contradicts itself every time it comes up.

What I have:

#	Asked?	Volume at the time	Change	Days to decision
1	yes	flat	none	9
2	no	up 3x over 6wk	+$4	—
3	yes	up 2x	+$2	4
4	yes	flat	none	21
5	no	up 4x	+$6	—
6	yes	down	none, and a quality review	2

Six of the eleven are useful, the other five are offers that ended before anything happened.

Read one way, asking never moved anything on its own and volume moved things whether I asked or not. Read another way, my sample is six and I have no idea what the counterfactual is on the two unprompted ones - maybe an AM asked internally because I'd asked six weeks earlier.

What I want is your rows. Asked or didn't, volume trend at the time, what changed. Not 'ask and you shall receive', which is what I get every time I raise this.

volume. next question

asked last tuesday and got +5 on friday!! so it definitely works

On what volume?

like 60 a week? maybe 70 on a good one

that's not a bump, that's an intro rate correcting itself

Caveat before anything else: I ask two or three times a year, I run mid volume, and my sample is smaller than yours. But I think the table is measuring the wrong variable.

1. Asking doesn't create budget. Volume creates budget. What asking does is decide who inside the network gets the budget when it appears, and that is not nothing - I have twice been given a rate that came out of a pot the AM told me afterwards had been allocated 'to whoever pushed for it'. Neither of those show up as caused by asking in a table like yours, because the volume moved first.

2. The timing is the whole game. Asking in week two of an offer gets you nothing and marks you. Asking three days after the advertiser raises a cap gets you the number, and the reason is that the AM has a spreadsheet with a hole in it that week.

3. The thing nobody says out loud: you're not negotiating with the network, you're giving your AM something to take to the advertiser. Give them the sentence they'll use. 'I can add 40% on top of current if the economics work' is a sentence they can forward. 'Can you do better on the rate' is a sentence they have to translate.

So I'd rewrite your question. Not asked versus didn't. Asked at a moment when money was moving versus asked at a random Tuesday.

That's a coherent story and I can't test it, which is my problem with it.

'Asked at a moment when money was moving' is unfalsifiable from where I sit. I don't see the advertiser's cap changes. I see my volume and my rate. If the rule is 'ask when the budget appears' and I can't observe the budget appearing, then operationally the advice reduces to 'ask often and attribute the hits'.

Rows 2 and 5 in my table are the ones that actually moved and I asked for neither of them. That's the only clean signal I've got.

Three rows for you, all 2023-24, one network each.

First: asked, volume flat for two months, got a flat no and nothing else happened. Second: asked, volume roughly doubled over five weeks, got +$3 in about a week and they offered a further +$2 if I hit a number I never hit. Third: didn't ask at all, volume was flat, and they raised me $4 out of nowhere in January - which I later found out was because they'd lost two other affiliates on the same offer and needed the volume backfilled.

That third one is the one that made me stop believing there's a rule. Nothing I did caused it. Somebody else quit.

What's your longest gap between asking and something happening? Mine was about eleven weeks and I'd completely forgotten I'd asked.

Depends what you're running, and I think that's more of the answer than either side is allowing for.

On a lead gen offer where the advertiser's own margin per lead is fixed and thin, there is genuinely no room and asking is noise. On anything with a revenue share hiding behind the CPA - and there's more of that than people realise - the number you're on was picked out of a range, and the range has a top. Asking works on the second kind and doesn't on the first, and neither of you can tell which one you're on from the dashboard.

The tell is how fast the no comes back. A same-day no is a rate card. A no that takes nine days went somewhere and came back.

Sixty a week. Congratulations on your seat at the table.

For me actually is the same as byte_broker say but with one more thing. In LATAM the payout is already low so the AM have more room, not less. Twice i ask and twice they move it, small but they move.

My friend in Europe on the same offer, same network, he ask and they say the rate is the rate. So maybe the answer depend where you sit, not only how much you push. Nobody talk about this.

I've been asking networks for money since 2011 and I want to give you the historical version, because the answer has changed and everyone in this thread is arguing about a snapshot.

Up to around 2014, rates were negotiated and nothing else. There was no rate card. You talked to a man, he made a number up, and if you pushed he made a bigger number up. Asking was the entire mechanism because there was no other mechanism.

Then the platforms arrived. Around 2016-17 every network of any size ran the same three or four pieces of software, and those had a rate field per offer per affiliate, which meant somebody had to have a policy about what went in it. Policies mean tiers, tiers mean thresholds, thresholds mean volume. That's when 'it's just volume' became mostly true, and MetricsOverMagic's table is measuring a world that started then.

What's happened since about 2022 is that the networks got squeezed and the good AMs left, and what you've got now is a lot of platforms with a tier system nobody has updated since the person who designed it quit. That is why Marta_K's version works and looks like magic: she isn't beating the policy, she's finding the gap where the policy stopped being maintained.

The one useful sentence: the rate you're on was set by a rule, and whether asking works depends entirely on whether anyone still enforces the rule. You find that out by asking, which is circular, which is why this thread will never end.

nine paragraphs to say try it and see

Six more rows in from PM, added to mine. Nineteen total.

Volume trend	Asked	Rate moved	Didn't
Rising	yes	5	2
Rising	no	3	1
Flat	yes	1	5
Flat	no	0	2

On rising volume, 8 of 11 moved regardless of whether anyone asked. On flat volume, 1 of 8 moved and that one was grubstake88's backfill, which had nothing to do with him.

So the honest reading is: volume is doing almost all of the work, and asking on flat volume has a hit rate somewhere around 12% on a sample far too small to quote. Which is not zero, and I'll grant Marta_K that a 12% shot at a permanent rate increase is a good trade for one email.

What I won't grant is that asking is the mechanism. It looks like a tiebreaker.