Recently WearTesters launched a subscription program, https://weartesters.com/join/, and I questioned why a Complex site would need to do this. I used to browse the site a lot in the past, but lately I haven’t been checking in on the YouTube or the site. Not for any competitive reasons, I’ve just been extremely busy fleshing out the growth plan for ARCH and in doing so I found myself no longer visiting a lot of sites I used to hit. Complex related sites, Solecollector and what used to be SneakerNews and Weartesters, no longer wear the badge at the footer of the site connecting them to Complex. Now, I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I do distinctly remember both sites being a part of the Complex Network and now the badging isn’t there. Logically, this means that there is a drop in revenue by no longer being affiliated with Complex. All sites earn revenue by a few basic means:
Ad Revenue
Sponsorship
Donations
E-commerce
Subscriptions
Affiliates
I’ve given the breakdown several times on what each of the forms of generating income for a site entails. What I’m focusing on today by talking about Weartesters is their decision to move towards a Patreon styled subscription model. This had to occur. If Complex is no longer funneling sneakers to the site (if they ever did, I don’t know) then WT has to buy these kicks. When you consider that this year alone my expenses for buying things for ARCH are right at $610,000 WearTesters isn’t in the same business as I’m in where I utilize resale as a tool for creating data sets and business articles. There isn’t anyway possible for the WT site to take on the challenge of buying shoes to review at the pace that the internet consumes. I’ve done a video per day for over 600 days on my YouTube. That’s an insane rate of video creation that couldn’t be sustained as a review site where I’m buying shoes in my size only.
I bring all of this up to talk about the ramifications of StockX’s unicorn status. ARCH has never truly relied on Affiliate sales. When Housakicks was a part of my network, I created that site to be more of a sneakerhead website and Housakicks generated a considerable amount of revenue from eBay affiliates. That has since changed. Tayib wrote an article on this change and discussed how he uses the StockX affiliate program which doesn’t pay very well at all:
https://housakicks.com/business/a-quick-breakdown-of-may-on-housakicks-stockx-benefited-the-most/
On ARCH, I have my online shop set up to funnel clicks to both eBay Affiliate Program and Amazon Affiliates, but this has never been my focus. I move enough sneakers in resale that my focus has always been on writing about the business aspects of the sneaker world. It was always nice over the last few years to get that extra money that showed up from my eBay Affiliates Program.
Unfortunately, one of the problems for many webmasters is that as StockX has grown, sales have shifted from eBay. This means that all of the shoes on my online store and in my verification videos no longer garner any CTR or sales. At the lead of this story was my sales chart from 2018. Below for comparison are my charts from 2018 and 2019:
As StockX has become more prominent in the third party marketplace, if you read through Tayib’s article on his site and if you look at these two charts of mine, you see something that doesn’t bode well for the much bigger websites of the former Complex affiliates. It doesn’t bode well for many sneaker bloggers. By September of 2018 I had over 3000 dollars in affiliate sales. I finished the year at over $4,000. This year three quarters of the way through I’ve only sent 1000 dollars in sales to eBay. This should be reason to worry for the third party giant. For sneaker sites that rely on affiliate sales this is a major issue. It would stand to reason that this same drop-off would happen in Ad Revenue, but because ARCH has moved to more video my ad revenue numbers have increased considerably; hence the focus on developing a media company.
These are the conversations that aren’t taking place in the sneaker industry. I’m interested in the experience of other bloggers who are being directly affected by the shift in 3rd party. What are your thoughts?
