Creative & CRO
BS Offer
An offer of questionable legitimacy, often requiring extra due diligence before running.
A BS offer is an offer of questionable legitimacy — dubious products, unrealistic promises, or shaky advertisers — that demands extra due diligence before a buyer commits traffic to it. The red flags are familiar: payouts well above market for the vertical, an unknown advertiser with no track record, vague terms, and conversion flows that look designed to generate disputes.
Experienced buyers treat suspiciously rich payouts as a warning, not an opportunity, because the real risk is never getting paid: shaving, retroactive quality claims, or the advertiser vanishing at payment time. Standard practice is running a small test budget, demanding short payment cycles or prepayment from unproven partners, and checking the offer's reputation in buyer communities before scaling. Chargeback-heavy BS offers can also poison your relationship with the traffic source.
In buyer speech
“That $450 CPA from the unknown network smells like a BS offer — run $500 max and don't scale until the first payment actually lands.”