While going over the latest posts on theABW Forum I came across a thread by an affiliate asking "Why was I auto rejected by three merchants?". It seems that some merchants still use their network filters to reject applications on the fly based upon;

* Affiliate Location
* Affiliate Stated Traffic
* Affiliate Stated Page Views

Which makes me think "Huh?"

Lets take location first. Why reject all affiliates who aren't from the USA? Is the assumption that "Those folks from down under are from... down under.... and obviously can't build a site for US traffic!" Or just a general lack of knowledge, that people from any country in the world can buy a .com domain and build a site to target any other country in the world (Assuming they know the language of course).

Yes most affiliates do live in the USA, but there are also great affiliates in Australia, the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, South Africa and everywhere else. I can, to an extent understand filtering out some of the countries that generate a lot of fraud, but even those locations have some gems to be found, so why not take the trouble to manually review them instead of rejecting them on the fly?

Traffic and Page views: hands up if you have a site that claims to have 500,000 page views a month, gives thousands of banner impressions, next to no clicks and gets maybe one sale a month if you're lucky!

How about a fair number of sites that state they get less than a 1000 page views, but get 300 click throughs each and convert very nicely.

Yes some small sites are... in need of work, but also a lot of small low traffic sites, are very niche, attract people through very specific keywords and links and can drive a conversion rate that exceeds higher traffic sites. They may never be in your top 50 earners, but they drive constant high conversion.

You never know when a person putting their traffic as under 500 will turn out to be your next high conversion partner. And of course it's just as likely that the person putting 500,000 visitors a month in their profile is.... well, exaggerating a little.

Filters based on location, nationality or traffic make no sense to me, but please, don't let me stop you using them, I'll take your affiliates with low traffic, low page views and those folks from overseas who speak funny.