Fetish.com

What Fetish.com is

Fetish.com is a kink and BDSM dating community with a free membership and a paid upgrade, and its webmaster page invites outside businesses to work with it. The invitation reads "Join our Affiliate Network right now! Are you a kick-ass sexblogger or a dating guru? Maybe a fetish club manager or a venue owner? Do you organise kinky events or run your own sex-positive online business?" So it targets bloggers, club and venue operators, event organizers and sex-positive businesses, and the pages describe no payment to individual performers. The site runs in English and German, with regional pages for the kink scenes in the UK and Ireland, the USA and Canada. The footer names Ideawise Limited in Hong Kong as the operator and says payment and debt collection are handled by Compay GmbH in Germany.

Next to the affiliate invitation, the same page sells promotion on the site. It says a business that wants to be promoted on Fetish.com and its partner sites can email for advertising packages and partnership deals, and a form requests a Media Kit PDF. That means two routes sit side by side, one in which a partner earns by referring members and one in which a business pays to be seen, and the page does not separate them with terms.

How earning works here

The webmaster page lists what an affiliate gets. The affiliate is rewarded "for every new Fetish.com member that comes through your domain", so the paying action is a new member arriving from the partner's site. The program supplies "provocative artwork and creative banner sets", and the page shows the banner sizes on offer: 468x60, 728x90, 320x50, 300x250, 250x250, 180x150 and 160x600. Tracking runs on a third-party stack the page names, with "full link tracking and reporting on PlayaMedia's performance marketing platform". Account managers are there "to optimise your outcome", and the page promises social media content "that goes viral" for partners who promote through their channels.

The pitch around those points is about fit rather than money. The page says the community is guided by safe, sane and consensual principles and that its mission is to serve the BDSM community "while attracting a mainstream but kink-curious audience", ending on "Let's Make Money!". It does not say whether a reward is paid on a free registration or only on an upgrade, which is the main thing a partner will want to settle with the account manager.

The rest of the site shows what an affiliate would be promoting. A visitor can create a free personal profile, search with the Fetish Search, join forum discussions, read and contribute erotica, and message other members; the home page says messaging, chatting and image sharing are free around the clock. Events and places sections appear in the navigation. A BDSM Training School, launched in December 2020, runs as an online learning portal led by what the site calls vetted and experienced non-risk BDSM instructors. The site also describes supporting Movember and donating the proceeds of membership upgrades to it.

The paid side is the upgrade. The privacy policy names Premium and VIP memberships and says those members can turn off advertising. According to the guidelines page, free users can join the live chat rooms but cannot create them, and upgraded members can open private rooms where roleplay is allowed by agreement between users. The registration form takes men, women, couples, non-binary and trans members and calls sign-up "free, non-binding, and risk-free", which is the promise an affiliate's banner is selling.

A partner sites page names three other properties: Gays.com, popcorn.dating and Koko. Gays.com is a gay dating site, popcorn.dating is for sex-positive chat and meetups, and Koko is a dating app. Gays.com and popcorn.dating both offer free sign-up, and Koko is on the App Store and the Play Store. The advertising offer says promotion can extend to "our partner sites", but the affiliate list on the webmaster page speaks only of Fetish.com members.

A further page gives a use for the site that has nothing to do with payment. The amateur videos page tells members they may upload videos they have recorded, provided every person in the video has consented, and warns that anyone who uploads without consent could be prosecuted. It also says to weigh up that something online can be found for years even after removal, in the spirit of "Risk Aware Consensual Kink".

Money and rules

The webmaster page publishes no reward amount, threshold, schedule or payout method; those terms come from the account managers. The contact route for both affiliates and advertisers is an email address at PlayaMedia, the same company whose platform does the tracking, and a visitor can also submit a name, email and website to receive the Media Kit PDF instantly.

The member rules are stated more fully and also bind anyone promoting the site.

• Money: the guidelines say "We don't allow anyone to offer or request money - period", and that a member asked for money should report the user.
• Advertising: advertising goods or services, spamming and conducting market research are not allowed anywhere on the site. The same page says a business that wants to advertise should contact the site, which matches the webmaster page.
• Privacy of kink: members must not mention someone else's kink in a vanilla setting unless that person does. Violators are permanently banned and new profiles are blocked.
• Roleplay belongs in private rooms only.
• Age checks: the policy page describes age verification through Yoti, which estimates age from a portrait photo or video and reports whether the person was estimated to be over 23, deleting the data within 28 days once the purpose is fulfilled. Full ID verification means submitting a legal ID document and a selfie that Yoti compares with the ID photo. In Germany there is also a PIN check through the member's bank.
• Sign-in: Login with Facebook is available and passes the member's username, email address, gender, first name and profile picture.

Who it suits and who it does not

The affiliate invitation fits a person who already serves the kink scene: a blogger, a club manager, a venue owner, someone who runs munches or kinky events. Such a person has a community that might move to a free profile, and the site's training school and forum give referred members something to do after joining. An organizer may also care that the site lists events and places.

It fits less well a partner who wants to know the rate before the first call, since the reward per member is not published. The strict no-commerce rule is another caveat: the site bars advertising by members, so promotion has to go through the arranged route, not through a profile or a chat room. A performer who wants to sell content will not find a paid-content product described on these pages, since the money rules rule out member-to-member payments. Because the same page sells advertising packages to businesses, a partner should be clear whether a conversation is about earning from referrals or paying for exposure.