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Home » The Famous Blog » ThirstyAffiliates VS MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliates

ThirstyAffiliates VS MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliates

November 29, 2011 - Last Modified: May 7, 2018 by Hesham Zebida 2,526

ThirstyAffiliates VS MaxBlogPress Ninja

There are many great WordPress plugins dedicated to help internet marketer and blogger to build their business and ear money in a way or another. Today, you are going to read about two plugins that I’ve used here on the blog, these plugins are used to manage affiliate links on WordPress blogs, plus give the links a pretty URL and allow you to clock it.

Almost every internet marketer that I know is using a plugin or a service to manage links. If you are not using any plugin to manage your affiliate links, then you should do.

The reason I’ve written this post is that I’ve got a question from Jens P. Berget of The Smart Marketing Mix blog asking:

I have been using Ninja Affiliate by MaxBlogPress for a while. What’s the difference between ThirstyAffiliates and Ninja Affiliates? To me, it seems very similar.

So, I am going to reply to this question in this post and try to put some between the ThirstyAffiliates VS MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate

I’ve done a review of ThirstyAffiliates plugin recently on the blog, so you might be interested in reading it.

ThirstyAffiliates VS MBP Ninja Affiliate Plugins

Let’s put this into a table to make it more clear and readable:

Features ThirstyAffiliates Ninja Affiliate
Technique used ThirstyAffiliates plugin is using the WordPress Custom Post Type feature to create the links. Ninja Affiliate plugin create links by it’s own way, and save them to the database using SQL quires.
Affiliate link cloaking Yes! Yes!
Track clicks and stats Yes! (via separate addon) Yes!
NoFollow links Yes! Yes!
Categorization and Grouping Yes! (via WordPress categories, easy to search for affiliate links) Yes! (Using it’s own category listing, and it’s own way for the search, not working effectively)
Sub campaigns Yes! (via WordPress sub categories) Yes! (Using it’s own way to create sub campaigns, also it can created by adding “-” and a keyword at the end of the link to track it, easy to use as you don’t have to login)
NoFollow links Yes! Yes!
Convert Keywords Automatically No! Yes!
Database Make use of default WordPress tables Create it’s own tables, and duplicate posts/comments data, this doubles database size (not a good prospect)
Data Backup/Restore Backup/Restore can be done easily via any WordPress plugin that backup database. Has it’s own Backup/Restore feature.
Price and License
  • Premium unlimited sites $59
  • Standard single site $39

Visit Site

  • Unlimited licenses edition $97
  • Single licenses edition $37

Visit Site

[box type=”info”]With respect to both plugin authors, this comparison presents my pure personal opinion. I hope this helps in the development of both plugins, and gives insights to my blog readers that encourage them to choose what’s the best for their business.[/box]

Treat Your Affiliate Links

Your Affiliate links should be treated as valuable assets, it’s one of the great tools that makes you money and gives you information about what’s going on on your blog via its stats, if those links went down for any reason, then simply there is no money, you won’t make any!

My issue with MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin

What I’ve written below is only my personal experience with the plugin, it doesn’t mean it will apply to every blog. It’s not my attention to post a negative review about the Ninja Affiliate plugin, and I am thankful to Pawan Agrawal -the founder of the plugin- because they’ve contacted me a year a go and offered me a free review copy of the plugin, and that’s what I did, I reviewed the plugin, and I was recommending it to everyone I know.

But since the blog is growing, getting more content, and traffic, I had to look into this in a different way, I can not recommend the plugin 100% like I did before, keep reading to know why!

Something wrong is going on!

I am getting a random warning almost everyday caused by the Ninja, however Warning doesn’t harm, but whenever my blog breaks it display the Warning messages, and it’s like telling to the whole world that this plugin is causing issues!

And, because we talk here about Money! I am afraid I am losing the trust! I am afraid that I am losing opportunities of making a sales!

The warning I am getting is:

[box type=”red”]Warning: mysql_num_rows() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /home/famous/public_html/wp-content/plugins/maxblogpress-ninja-affiliate/ninja-affiliate-library/include/mbp-ninja-affiliate.cls.php on line 199[/box]

I’ve opened a thread in MaxBlogPress forum a while ago, but I didn’t get a clear answer! So, I decided to live with the problem till I find a solution, especially that I am not the only one who is getting this warning, there are 100s of results in Google using the  file name as a keywords “mbp-ninja-affiliate.cls.php” to see by yourself!

It’s embarrassing!

Based on my little experience, it looks like there is a variable with no default value! But what drives me crazy is that my other blogs works perfectly with no issues, those blogs has only a few blog posts and pages. So, it seems that blogs with larger amount of content are more likely to suffer.

The Ninja Affiliate Increases Database Size!

You see, it’s really odd to find out that a single plugin increases your database size this way, the Ninja Affiliate plugin makes a copy of posts and comments data and save it on another table of its own, I guess the developer of the plugin made these extra tables to cache all posts and comments to enable automatically convert keywords into affiliate links (which is a feature that I am not interested in).

To explain this, let’s imagine that you published a post, and you want to auto link some keywords in that post, the Ninja will save that post into the database (into it’s own table) after adding the links using the keywords you’ve chosen, so whenever someone visits your blog, the Ninja will take over and display the other copy of your post. This means the original post won’t be displayed this time!

See by yourself (this is a screenshot of my database):

FB database

I can not hide the truth of me getting desperate many times!

Right now.. I have this:

right now

And this:

Famous Bloggers site stats

I am planning to grow this blog, but I don’t know what will happen in the next couple of years, what could happen if I have 5000 blog posts and 100.000 comments?

I mean who would accept the huge increase in database size caused by a plugin?

My guess is that the guys over MaxBlogPress haven’t thought about the future, maybe they couldn’t test the plugin on a live blog with over 1000 posts and several thousands of comments because it’s really hard to find this testing environment or model that re-generates the same exact Warnings in real life, so I really don’t blame them, they’ve tried to help affiliate marketers, and their plugins it works for a lot of people, but I have my own doubts about the future.

However, I still recommend the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin for small size blogs, or to be more specific, blogs that has a few posts and pages, and they do not have plans to grow rapidly (have another opinion? please share it).

I think that after a year from now, I won’t be able to use the plugin, and another important thing… I won’t be able to remove it from my setup (I hate it when a plugin force me to use it), it’s really hard -near to impossible- to edit 1000+ posts to change the links I’ve added manually to these posts!

I was looking for a solution to end this issue, but it’s not my problem to try fix a premium plugin developed by someone else! And to be honest I don’t have enough experience to debug it! So, I’ve tested a few other plugins, but I didn’t like them at all, till I’ve got a copy of  ThirstyAffiliates plugin, which got my full attention!

Why I am switching to ThirstyAffiliates plugin

The ThirstyAffiliates plugin uses the custom post types, this means it’s almost pure functionality of WordPress, which also means less problems, this plugin is the most stable tool for managing affiliate links on a WordPress site, period.

I’ve checked the code of ThirstyAffiliates plugin, really simple coding that do a lot, also I liked the idea of planning the future of the plugin to have additional addons that adds more features and functionality to the plugin. This simply will open the doors for other developers to contribute to ThirstyAffiliates and produce new addons, this means more opportunity, and probably more profits from the plugin if someone decided to develop a premium addon.

So far, there are two addons that are available for ThirstyAffiliates as a bonus:

  1. The Statistics Addon (this addon allows you to track clicks on your links)
  2. And the Importer Addon. (to import your aff links from Nina affiliate)

However, I don’t like the dark backgrounds in the admin pages, I feel it’s too much, I’ve told Josh Kohlbach -the developer of the plugin- about it, and he’ve told me it will be removed in the coming releases.

Conclusion

As I said before, there are great plugins for WordPress CMS out there, but some of them do the job perfectly, some are not that good, many do nothing. The problem is when you count on a plugin and you build your business model based on that particular plugin, then it turns to give you issues, there is no simple way to avoid it! However, you won’t know if a plugin will cause an issue in the future so that you avoid using it! You won’t even think of it this way when you first started your business blog.

Lessons I’ve learned

  • When it’s about coding, web hosting.. etc. There no certainty in the world we live in!
  • Some times things work great for others, but it just don’t work for you!
  • There is no good and bad plugins, there are plugins that works for me!
  • Not every recommended plugin is a must have.
  • Should I use this plugin? (You are the only one who can answer it by testing it out!)
  • The only one to blame is you!

I know that Ninja Affiliate plugin is used by 1000s of internet marketers and bloggers, but there is always a room for another plugin, the competition is what makes the end user a winner, and anyways I am recommending the ThirstyAffiliates plugin because I believe it will solve a future problem for me as I grow my blog.

I appreciate your thoughts!

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Filed Under: Affiliates, Wordpress

About Hesham Zebida

Follow @hishaman

I create websites with WordPress, and I develop Schema Plugins to help SEOs. I am a social network lover. I am also the night creature who works hard to keep this project up. Owner and founder of the Famous Blog.

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{ 25 Responses }

  1. Enstine Muki says:
    Hi Hesham, I have Ninja Affiliates on my blog and it's been running great but I think the future is dark from what I have read here. I need to check Thirsty Affiliates for a better option
  2. Ram Shengale says:
    I read a couple of reviews earlier on Ninja Affiliate and all of them talked just about the pros of it (maybe because of affiliate commissions). Thanks for this true review and directing me towards the better solution ThirstyAffiliates. Regards, Ram
  3. John says:
    After having to supply my email to maxblogpress to use a wordpress plugin (which didn't work) I have been badly spammed with malicious email including fake linkedin emails with links to various sites including sites riddled with viruses. There are numerous complaints about this guy on the web and he should be shut down as everyone is requesting. Warning not to go near any of his products.
  4. Pawan Agrawal says:
    Hi Hesham, I'm glad to see the way you presented your view regarding Ninja Affiliate. I want to clear out some confusion that you and other bloggers might have regarding Ninja Affiliate. Ninja Affiliate was developed around 4 years ago and I designed its algorithm thinking about the future rather than just for that time. I did a number of research before I designed the algorithm. There are number of auto keyword to link conversion wordpress plugins in the market, but there is very less to almost none of it which can perform like Ninja Affiliate. I will tell you how Ninja Affiliate outperforms all other auto keyword to link conversion wordpress plugin in terms of resources, load time and features in a moment. But before that, let me tell you one thing frankly - Automatically converting keywords into link consumes a lot of web server resources. Let me show you how much resources other plugin consumes compared to Ninja Affiliate. Lets say you've automatically converted 4 keywords inside the blogpost - (3 in content, 1 in comment) Can you guess how much resources it consumes per visit? Total 4 keyword conversion = 4 resources. That's for single visit. Now here comes the interesting part... If 5 people visit the same blogpost, then other plugins will consume 5 x 4 = 20 resources In case of Ninja Affiliate, it consumes only 4 resources. If 100 people visit the same blogpost, then other plugins will consume 100 x 4 = 400 resources. In case of Ninja Affiliate, it still consumes 4 resources. Now imagine, how much other plugin will consume per month if readers visit the same blogpost. But Ninja Affiliate still consumes 4 resources... Well that's just for one blogpost, Imagine, how much resources other plugins will consume if readers visit other blogposts. Ninja Affiliate consumes very less resources compared to any other automatically keyword to link conversion wordpress plugin. Why Ninja Affiliate is different? Because we have spent a huge chunk of our time tweaking the caching mechanism, so that once the keyword replacement is calculated it won’t re-calculate again until your blog post changes leaving your blog running like a top. And another feature that Ninja Affiliate outperforms other auto keyword to link wordpress plugin is the "Random linking feature" Lets say you're converting a 3 keywords "supplements" in a blogpost and you got total 6 keywords "supplements" scattered in the blogpost. Normally what other plugins do is , it picks the first 3 keywords and turn into links. So if there're 3 keywords "supplements" in the first paragraph, then it will turn those first 3 keywords into link and the rest of the keywords stays untouched. Result, it makes your blog look unprofessional with all the link clustered in one place. But Ninja Affiliate doesn't work like that. Ninja Affiliate won't simply pick the FIRST 3 keywords to turn into links. (It's easy to code that way that's why no other plugins bother to improve it) Instead, it will pick them randomly throughout the page so you don't end up with all your links clustered at the top. Again, it's all about keeping your blog looking professional while enticing them to discover what's on the other side of that link. Regarding the increased size of the database that you have shown in the screenshot, let me explain it: Server's cpu usage is much more precious than the database storage capacity. You can get storage at a fraction of cost than the cpu resource. Most of the website switch to VPS or dedicated server not because of storage limitation but because of the high cpu usage. That's why we use caching instead of lagging down the server by consuming lots of cpu resources. You might have seen people recommending wpcache or similar kind of plugin to stop overloading their server by their wordpress website. Our caching is smart and cache only the text portion, so it will consume very very less space. Even if you post multiple times daily and run your blog for 10 years or more it will only occupy very less storage space but will dramatically save your website from ever overloading. More than half of our time developing this plugin was consumed for perfecting this caching feature. It would have been much easier to develop the plugin without caching feature but we did it just because we care about our users and want to work our plugin perfectly under the hood as well. If you have any further queries regarding the performance of Ninja Affiliate or anything then please feel free to contact me.
  5. Amit Shaw says:
    Thanks Hesham for this awesome comparison. Yeah i have wrote a review of ninja affiliate too and Only Postive Side. But am Facing Some Issue with my database with it. Would love to try Thirsty Affiliate Plugin Too. Thanks.
  6. rakesh kumar says:
    This is a great comparison as you did in your article, I always like only that plugin that tweak wordpress functionality. Thristyaffiliates does it the same way, before this article, Ninja affiliate was favorite. So thanks for this great comparison.
  7. Michael Aulia says:
    I bought Pretty Link Pro recently and it's having problems trying to convert keywords on my posts (might be clashing with some other JavaScript or plugins). Thinking to get the Ninja Affiliate but I'm glad I come to this post of yours!! Would have a look at Thirsty Affiliates instead, as recommended by other commenters here and you
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Hey Mike, After a few months now of using Thirsty Affiliates plugin, I just had no option but to install it on my other blogs, it's simply the best way to manage affiliate links. However, it won't automatically convert keywords, it doesn't support this feature. and FYI, when I took a look into the past, I figure out that I never relay on automating keyword links, it wasn't important for me -personally!
      • Michael Aulia says:
        Thanks for the reply Hesham. I was just offered a review license of ThirstyAffiliates. Been busy converting my old links from PrettyLink Pro manually :D Wish it has auto convert keywords though like you, I haven't really done that in the past. Didn't really want to annoy my readers with so many links (since it will be automated) Glad you like the plug-in. I'm still trialing but so far so good. Love how easy it is to search + add links to the post without having to memorize what links you have
        • Hesham Zebida says:
          Great, I am sure you will like it. Speaking about reviews, I know you do a lot of reviews on your blog, so have you heard about my latest plugin? Check out the Author hReview plugin, maybe it will get your interest as it help you add Google's rich snippets to your review posts and get a little shiny rating stars in search results.
          • Michael Aulia says:
            Wow, nice work, Hesham. I'm already using another hreview plug-in (http://www.cravingtech.com/how-to-enable-hreview-microformat-on-your-blog-and-get-more-traffic.html) But yours looks sexier (from the screenshots). I'll take a look, thanks for contributing to the community :)
            • Hesham Zebida says:
              I came across this plugin before, but didn't like the way it embed the snippets and the rating star images into the post, anyways all are good :)
  8. Jon says:
    Excellent comparative analysis. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Have not used either but did buy ALL IN ONE MONETIZER off a WSO last year and never got around to installing it. If anyone is familiar with or has used that plugin I would value feedback. As for affiliate links although I have some in posts on my niche sites I recently decided this wasn't such a good idea since they directly feed the vendor. Now I'm changing those links to direct to opt-in squeeze pages to build lists to whom I can include affiliate links in follow up emails. Would value your thoughts on including affiliate links in niche websites.
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Hi Jon, I really don't see a problem in including your affiliate links in anyway, it's up to you, however I would test it and see how it perform! for a nice site, it makes a lot of sense if you include links related products or services, give your visitors good recommendation and more choices!
  9. Paul T. says:
    Hi Hesham, Thanks for the post. I found it as I was looking for more information on mpb ninja plugin. I have used cloakpig and pretty link lite and pro.. and in all ocassions the plugins are causing to get clicks everytime a robot comes to my place, even if the link is a no follow link. If I turn the plugin on, i could get hundreds of clicks in an hour, all coming from robots.. so it is a mess. Have you experienced any problems like that with mpb ninja or thirsty affiliates plugins? I appreciate the feedback, Thanks!
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      mm.. strange, I have no idea what could cause that!
  10. Ana Hoffman says:
    I had quite a few problems with Ninja Affiliate myself, Hesham. Here's my main problem with them: each time I created a post with "Product Name + Review", the plugin would automatically create links for that permalink. So whenever someone would try to click on the post from my home page, they were automatically redirected to the product page and now my post. You can only imagine what a havoc it caused... Truth is it never quite worked properly on my blog. On the other hand, I am in love with Thirsty Affiliates. The only feature I am missing is automatic linking, but I am sure Josh will be working on that!
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Hey Ana, I remember I've discussed with josh the auto linking feature and probably he won't add it to the core of the plugin, probably because not everyone need this feature. And, by the way, most of my problems with the Ninja Affiliate plugin comes from the auto linking! Anyways, let's see what will happen!
  11. Jens P. Berget says:
    Awesome post! I have been using Ninja Affiliate for a long time, but after reading about Thirsty Affiliates on a different blog I got interested. Now, I didn't really have any problems with Ninja Affiliate, other than that it kept adding more subcategories automatically (I don't know what happened). I wanted more control, so I bought Thirsty Affiliates a few days ago. I'm very satisfied so far.
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Hi Jens, Thanks to you I wrote this post! I knew it won't fit in a comment reply :) Thanks for your feedback!
  12. Matt Kinsella says:
    I haven't been blogging for long and any advice like this to help create more money from my blog is great to know. You have obviously spent quite some time and effort collating all this info, thanks for doing so.
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Hi Matt, Glad I could help, I appreciate your visit!
  13. Seshu says:
    In using either plugin, what happens if a vendor decides to suspend a campaign? Is it easy to find and change those links? Thanks for your endorsement of ThirstyAffiliates. I'll have to check them out now.
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Hey Seshu, It depends on how you added the links the first time, but mostly you will find them even by doing a simple search on your blog! (I imagine that we do a review or two for the same product, not 100s) The auto linking save you from that as all what you need to do is to remove the broken link from your affiliate plugin. The real problem is not editing a link or two, the problem happen when you actually need to change from a plugin to another, which means you could break many links on your blog! So, it's better to use something more native to WP like the ThirstyAffiliates.
      • Dave Doolin says:
        Totally concur, Josh really got it right using the WordPress custom post types facility for Thirsty Affiliates.

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