William Higgins Is No More

Okay, technically it still exists, but its zombie-like. It’s currently dragging its rotting torso along the ground snapping desperately at your ankles.

This is just my opinion, but from a business and affiliate perspective it’s a defunct brand no longer relevant in the adult entertainment space and you should expect it to dissipate into the miasma of porn history at any moment.

They’ll be shovelling thousands of scenes over to the “movie” outlets and flogging them for $4 before you know it.

Allow me to explain.

My partner and I have had an affiliate account with William Higgins since 2014 (yes, we’re old and tired). We generated some reasonable profit with them over that time. Not “Yay! Let’s buy a yacht!” money, more like “Huh, maybe we can take a drive down to the coast for the weekend and ogle the surfers?” kind of money.

It was never a spectacular earner for us, primarily because we prioritised other sponsors and focused more on other projects.

It was just running in the background. I would occasionally recommend William Higgins to a new Euro-centric copywriting client, or add a post here and there to our own network of sites.

Then, in 2016, things became problematic.

INVOICES?

The first sign that all was not well with William Higgins was their sudden insistence that they required invoices in order to make payments to affiliates.

In our twenty plus years of being affiliates, and my fifteen years of being a copywriter, my partner and I have never had to submit an invoice to a program in order to be paid what we are owed, and I know of no other affiliate who has.

But okay, another hoop to jump through. I can do a little light exercise as long as we finally get paid!

The second sign that things were going wrong was when those invoices were never satisfactory and the hoops started to become more elaborate. There was always something wrong. Messages asking about this would then be ignored. Another message would need to be sent, then another invoice, then another message.

Eventually payment was received, but this was so long ago I forget exactly what it took to finally get them to pay us. My memory isn’t what it was.

I do know that it took a long time, and constant risk of rolled metaphorical ankles by leaping over new and imaginative hurdles.

They demanded a new invoice every time. They claimed payment was sent to my PayPal and it was rejected (simply did not happen). They claimed the account information was incorrect when it had never been changed.

Incidentally, our payment information has remained “unconfirmed” for several years now despite confirming it originally and them using this information to make that payment.

(Maybe I’m just a cynic, but this seems like another method they use to justify not paying anyone. If you have an account there check your information and see if it yet again needs to be “confirmed”.)

The time it had taken just to get what was owed was unacceptable. I’d lost almost as much money dedicating my time to chasing them as I eventually gained from finally getting paid what they owed.

It became unfeasible to promote William Higgins after this point.

We should have known better, but we replaced the links we’d removed from our own sites and just allowed it to continue to generate a little money here and there. We stopped promoting them as we had been, and I stopped recommending William Higgins to new clients.

Now and then I would log-in and check the amounts. It was a piddly little thing, nothing to write home about. We weren’t planning any vacations on the money William Higgins was (theoretically) earning us.

FAST FORWARD

I checked the affiliate account again recently and discovered we had reached the payout threshold some time ago.

Nothing had been received.

I checked in with colleagues in the business and it was a familiar story. Numerous other affiliates had also not been paid, some for a long time.

Another had enjoyed the same adventure I had experienced the first time. They’d sent numerous invoices, followed up with emails requesting payment or additional information, and they simply never got paid. They gave up trying.

So, we were technically lucky in that instance. Perhaps we were just annoying enough that they relented.

That’s not the case this time.

We attempted to contact them through NATS – their affiliate interface – on May 29th 2024.

There was no response.

We attempted again on July 6th 2024.

There was no response.

We attempted again on July 30th 2024.

Again, there was no response.

We attempted to contact an individual who once worked as their social guy.

No response.

We sent an email to their public-facing “customer service” form on the website.

Received a form response one week later stating “We have received your email and we will respond to you as soon as we can.”

Two weeks later we replied to this again asking for an update.

A week on from that there has still been no response.

CONCLUSION

Sadly, this is a familiar and tiresome story in the adult business.

Anyone who has been an affiliate for long enough knows the deal.

Some studios/programs just screw everyone over. It doesn’t seem to matter how prominent or popular their brand is, or has been in the past. Someone who really doesn’t know what they’ve got or what they’re doing with it moves in and immediately just vomits in the aquarium and shits in the sink.

Several notable studios have completely destroyed their branding when a new owner took the reins and decided to just milk the business for everything they could get before riding off over a cocaine-haze horizon.

Do I need to mention FratMen?

Legacy doesn’t matter. Reputation is irrelevant. Longevity or stability are alien concepts to these people.

What was a stable business employing a good number of people and generating a good income for numerous affiliates becomes a total and utter clown car crash almost overnight.

Of course, we notice it when that first payment doesn’t arrive. As that timing is different for everyone a lot of affiliates keep their mouths shut about it. We usually only learn of it when several affiliates have been screwed over the same way and it hits GayDemon.biz.

Then we all have a little rant or (often futilely) try to get the money flowing.

It seems that WilliamHiggins.com (along with their lesser property Str8Hell.com) has suffered the same fate.

We don’t know who is running things now. I’ve discussed this with my partner and a few others in the industry and it seems no one knows what the situation is. No rep from the company is active in any of the online communities related to the adult business. As far as I’m aware they no longer send a delegation to any of the industry events held around the world. Their social media accounts are quiet and lacklustre.

They’re still producing content, but it seems as though they’re winding down.

Their models aren’t the caliber they once were. There are almost no new arrivals appearing on the site, they’re just the same models appearing for all the other European studios, and usually doing the same things.

Their production quality has significantly diminished in recent years.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the late and great William Higgins has been destroyed by whoever is currently in control there.

It’s a great shame for such a notable brand.

WHAT TO DO?

Because of this experience, we as a team are no longer promoting William Higgins via our own network of sites, but I am also no longer comfortable writing content related to their properties for any of my clients.

While it is of course the choice of my clients to promote who they wish, I don’t feel comfortable charging them for work that I know isn’t going to deliver any return.

When I write a sponsor post for an affiliate client and charge them $10 I know they’re going to make that money back. They’re at least going to break even on that post eventually. That’s no longer the case with William Higgins, so I’m not prepared to put my clients in that position.

If you need advice on who to promote instead, I recommend Jawked and BoyFun.

Disclaimer: I have a professional relationship with both websites, but I also promote them and know several others who do. I would not recommend them if I didn’t have faith that you will actually get paid.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve had a poor experience with William Higgins, or if they’ve been good to you. I’m willing to be fair if this is all some miraculously bad misunderstanding, but given the similar reports from so many others this seems implusible.

Are there any other studios we should be worried about?