To his credit, he'd already established that changing commissions from 10% to 5% to 1% made almost no difference to the affiliate schemes behaviour. It seems reasonable to assume that "optimising his campaign to reward affiliates" for any particular behaviour is unlikely to be worthwhile, if 50% and 90% reductions in payouts dosn't motivate them to change anything...

Perhaps an "experienced affiliate marketing user" might get different results, but if you're suggesting that a business who'll mislead you and rip you off happily unless you're a sophisticated-enough user of their service deserves a "trashing" any less than used car salesmen deserve their reputation – I think you're wrong. If _you_ come to me knowing your proposal involves you taking 10% commission on sales - where 98.4% of those sales were mine already, I'd call you out as a thief.