The end of ToyDemon’s affiliate program and the future of this blog (also hello!)

Hey guys, happy uuuuhh… MAY?! Where did the start of this entire year go already, bloody hell. I hope you’ve all had a good quarter of 2022 though, even if it still feels like an eternal extension of 2020. :’)

Apologies for just quietly vanishing! A lot of things sort of went wrong at the same time and I guess it basically resulted in a mental breakdown. I dunno, the past few months can probably be summarized as simply ‘giving up’.

It took fuckin’ ages to get out of this slump, but to me it’s only felt like a few weeks at best. Wild stuff. All I’ve wanted to do for the past couple months is completely isolate in both of the online and offline variety, so that’s exactly what happened.

This blog post in particular was originally going to be spewed up in early January, and since then I’ve debated if it’s even worth posting (it’s pretty whingy) but the bulk of this is still relevant going forward, so sure why not.

But yeah, 2021 ended on a rough note for the incredibly niche world of onahole blogging. A brown note if you will. Big farts. In a tale as old as Christmas itself, ToyDemon shut down their affiliate program a mere week before Santa (played by Tim Allen-san) was due to flex his arse cheeks inside various chimneys.

As the largest American retailer for onaholes and one of the better worldwide import options in general, this hit extremely hard. Personally ToyDemon had made up the vast majority of my monthly income from this blog for years now. Sometimes around the 100% mark.

No disrespect to the other retailers out there, but ToyDemon’s affiliate program absolutely dominated. Typically all the other onahole affiliate programs I’m signed up to make less in an entire year (COMBINED) than what one month of ToyDemon would bring in.

There’s a good reason I awkwardly posted about every single minor sale they had!

(I didn’t know what to break up the text with, so I’m just using more old Japanese sex toy shop photos looool)

Now to be fair – while still completely baffling – this wasn’t like a sudden decision on their part. ToyDemon warned this was going to happen months in advance, but initially never gave an estimated end date. They also never explained why, aside from a planned… visual upgrade to their site? I don’t think that even happened.

Foolishly I always assumed they’d reverse the decision at some point. I mean, this blog alone was pulling in some completely absurd sales for them on a weekly basis.

But nah, gone. ToyDemon terminated the program for all their affiliates mid-December. It was a massive punch in the gut and essentially game-ending for a lot of folks in an already tiny review scene.

Long time YouTube legend ‘XXX Branded Reviews’ cited the program’s closure as one of the reasons he won’t be doing any more reviews, and promising newcomers like ‘knifebro69′ basically had to drop out completely once the news hit. I imagine it’s even had a pretty brutal effect on my mates over at Onahole.eu.

To make matters worse, ToyDemon’s original announcement stated they’d be offering review products to their affiliates as a “whoops let’s still work together” kind of deal, but they never followed through on this. Absolutely nothin’.

To this day I still have no idea if it’s because ToyDemon were in trouble financially or if they’d simply gotten too big and had no use for affiliate marketing anymore. OH WELL.

(‘Penis correction’ is still probably about the most terrifying term you’d want to see in a sex shop)

I know how fuckin’ stupid it sounds to have someone cry about not making magical internet money from writing about masturbating of all things, but it was kinda nice to actually reach that point. Just need to vent a bit I guess.

Honestly my motivation fell down the toilet for a while there and I think it definitely showed in most of the blog’s content from late last year (it’s more ‘WOW SALES’ than anything else).

I didn’t exactly intend to drop off the planet for so long though!

I’ve taken a pretty bloody long break now after an initial reaction of “welp”, and ultimately came to the exciting conclusion that… CUM. I’m gonna keep doin’ this as long as humanly possible. Maybe even un-humanly too if robotics ever gets us there. Even if I eventually just start reviewing budget asbestos-loaded sex toys from Wish or something.

I really like writing about these things, and I love the community surrounding them (or rather, in them).

… Where else am I gonna have the chance to spew out barely comprehensible stories and obscure video game references for something like a bottle of liquid which vaguely smells like an anime girl’s bag of chips or whatever.

Been doin’ this for NINE YEARS now, so let’s try and get to at least ten. :’)

There’ll be some changes though! At least for the near future.

The bad:

– Unfortunately (onahole) competitions will be much less common, if at all. It’s been a lot of fun running these, but I can no longer afford ’em. Get ready for the return of horrendous Australian snack comps though, maybe. RIP.

– Reviews may also take a hit, but that’s probably not saying much given my recent output. Thankfully both otonaJP and MotsuToys have been extremely kind in sending me onaholes to review, and I currently have enough to pump out future content for a good while.

I’m now entirely reliant on review products though, which is a bit scary. In all reality I’ve likely burnt some bridges at this point by completely vanishing for months on end. I’ve got stuff from companies that I should have reviewed back in bloody December.

The good:

– …You won’t have to worry about seeing a ToyDemon advert banner anymore! (I’ll probably replace it with a KanojoToys one or something though, sshh).

– Since the closure of ToyDemon’s affiliate system, otonaJP reached out and I’m now part of their affiliate program. Hurray! Now their banner doubles as an affiliate thing on top of the existing “thanks for sending things I can put my penis into” agreement. Hopefully it works out.

– I’ll likely be switching to a cheaper WordPress theme soon (this one’s okay, but I haven’t paid for it in months which is prooooobably not ideal). This is good because it’ll be the kick in the dick I’ve needed to finally update and change a lot of stuff.

Ideally I wanna look into maybe finally creating an actual logo or something too, but wew lad, gettin’ a bit too ahead of myself here. I’ve only had nine bloody years to do that.

(The site may implode whenever I switch themes, but we’ll cross that shaft when we get to it I guess).

But yeah, business as usual from here on out! Sorry again for the absolute internet ghosting. I didn’t even have the courtesy to drop a simple “taking a break” message anywhere – I just couldn’t bring myself to check emails or social media. Fuck, I stopped doin’ pretty much anything for a good long while there.

Still unsure how I crawled back out of the (non-ona) hole I found myself in. Glad I did though.

Please look forward to upcoming reviews and THINGS. Thank you for putting up with my shit (AGAIN).

Much love,
Lance / Infernal