04-22-2003, 09:20 PM
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See sig. Join Epic Cash.
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Montreal, Quebec. ICQ: 214702014
Posts: 22,366
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Quote:
Originally posted by Rich J.
I forgot all about the bonus days. It's been awhile. We went to a straight $25 per signup in 98 not long after I started there.
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The collapse of the XCash program comes as XPics was moving beyond banners to a new ad strategy that was called the "modular" plan. In-house, it was codenamed "Armageddon."
Modular advertising supplanted the banners with full-page ads that looked like tables of contents for the sites hosting them. If you were on a free site, you could jump to an XPics module and click on thumbnail images, or buttons that said "lesbian" or "orgy," without knowing that you were leaving the free site for one of XPics' own. The modules used hahahahahahahahahaha to obscure the new URLs in the status bar of the browser. Once you were on an XPics server, you'd be asked for a credit-card number for "age verification."
Payment to webmasters would no longer be by-the-click, but by the number of registrations for membership on the XPics sites.
Beth Mansfield, the owner of Persian Kitty, an adult site index that gets 300,000 visitors a day, refused to include sites that used XPics modules in her index.
"They were tricking visitors with blind links to what looked like content, and I wasn't going to allow it on my site," she says.
The plan, she speculates, was to develop such a labyrinth of elaborately linked related sites that they wouldn't have to depend on -- or pay for -- ads on external sites. Mansfield believes that the XCash end game may be a ruse for dissolving the XPics brand into a number of smaller companies to "disperse their culpability in case a bunch of people file a class-action suit against them."
Jim Duvall concurs. "XPics exposure to chargebacks must have been increasing by a million [dollars] a day. It was at a point when it was so huge, it was bankruptcy for everyone involved."
If credit-card companies took a close look at what XPics has done, they'd "run from the Web," Duvall says.
With no comment from XPics other than the email, it's hard to know what will happen Friday, when the XCash program officially ends.
Seth, however, believes he can guess the game plan.
"I think they're packing up shop, getting houses in Hawaii, and smoking that bright green stuff with the crystals in it," he says. "It's the biggest scam in Internet history."
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Guess they were wrong about Hawaii, huh? |
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