How e-mail submits work and why you get scrubbed

I wanted to introduce myself on the forum, I have lurked for some time but want to begin to contribute.

I see a lot of people complaining about email submit offers and their conversions going down as you ramp up the offer so i figured i would shed some light on these offers and help you guys decide if you want to continue running them.

email submits are the target of fraudsters on a daily basis. The bot programs that automatically fill out email submit offers and promise to make you money doing nothing. The big email submit guys are able to catch this, but they also protect themselves by adding a scrub to the traffic. So lets say network A has an email submit and you're running traffic to it, all of a sudden someone with bad traffic (a bot) gets on the same offer, the advertiser will see in real time that people from network A arent backing out anymore and will start scrubbing the pixel fires until the traffic becomes profitable for them again. So one main reason why you see the scrubbing kick in is due to the fraud that tries to abuse the offer. Another reason is that the email submit guys are desperate to report profits as some are public companies and they just scrub to fatten their bottom line

The biggest email submit advertisers are Value Click, Active Response Group and The useful, 90% of email submit offers for free ipods, electronics, food, department stores, etc.. come from one of these 3 advertisers. Each one of them has been hit with fines from various attorney generals about their business practices. These advertisers are under pressure to be profitable at all costs which adds to their need to scrub even more.

I caught one advertiser trying to scrub over 80% of the leads we actually generated in our network. We showed about 3K leads, they said they showed the same, then told us there was fraud and they wanted to scrub more but this time they sent their internal unscrubbed report which showed almost 17K leads (They messed up)

So in short, even if you have good traffic these offers are going to scrub the balls off your traffic at some point. The days of email submit offers working well are past us. If you are able to stay profitable on email submits i would suggest working with a network that has good traffic on these offers already, they are less likely to see massive scrubbing.

Check the email spam you get for these offers and trace the network back, if you see the same network over and over, chances are that network is being scrubbed the least and is probably your best bet for running email submits without being scrubbed to death