My sig says it all.

Baddog has a good way of putting things into perspective.

Thank you, but I don't recall posting in this thread until now.

Ex-fucking-zactly, I personally hate programs that use Nats.

LOL

it's a quite ignorent post you made there

and your assumption is worse

as you correctly have observed, small programs use nats because it is way cheaper than a custom solution like perfect gonzo has.

To use nats do not in anyway prevent shaving, you can add and take away signups with that program.

And this is what your build your fear of them shaving on?
please...

LOL

it's a quite ignorent post you made there

and your assumption is worse

as you correctly have observed, small programs use nats because it is way cheaper than a custom solution like perfect gonzo has.

To use nats do not in anyway prevent shaving, you can add and take away signups with that program.

And this is what your build your fear of them shaving on?
please...

The difference is they do not support or have a module built in to do it. If they catch you you're done and pubically outed.
No one ever said it was impossible to shave with nats, but at least affiliates can feel rest assured that if the affiliate program is caught, it will be news.

Duke

Where can you take away signups???
Thats bullshit. Add them, yes.

Duke

hehheheh....
Interresting thread :D

Brilliant thread title I must say. :disgust

It proably plays a great deal in why they don't change. Finding out what numbers they do is finding the holy grail.

Yup, expect if it's used for shaving.

If I would tell you what the #10 of BB did in a pay period woudl you buy me a cookie?

Can you please tell me who told you this? Would like to know who is spreading false information about NATS...

Hi again,

Let me first say that i was not saying any of the companies i mentioned were actually shaving sales. That was the main reason for the ? in the title rather than using a . or ! If the title had allowed more characters and I?d thought about it a little longer.. i guess i'd have written something less suggestive to those unfamiliar with punctuation symbols. I?d forgotten for some people here like myself English is a 2nd language so that the question mark may not have been enough to make it obvious it was a question rather than a statement.

The post was more a question of why if NATS was unshavable had the largest companies not been pressured into using it. Since i was wrong to assume NATS is unshavable then it's seems the question has been answered.

I don't think the answer that " they have spent thousands on a bespoke system" would really be a good enough answer. If NATS had have been unshavable those bespoke systems should need to adapt to be able to prove the same or else abandoned. I'm confident that at some point in the future a system will be created which will make shaving impossible.

The person who said something like ...you can choose to promote a site that even though you believe it could be shaving you is making you decent money or else promote a site that you believe is honest and make the same or less ...is exactly how i see it....but don't really like it. The suprise to me is that many affils don't seem to mind at all and accept this could be the case but just get on with it regardless.

But is it really good that in this day and age that a company with huge resources could come along and produce the best content and therefore attract huge amounts of joins and still have the possibility to shave sales at a huge rate and still afford to pay you more that smaller companies?

Someone said they have invested millions of dollars (that may be a bit of an over estimate, since if you watch closely these models are mostly the same ones available from the known agencies for <600euros an hour and even 200k could produce enough content to keep you going for an age) but even if it was millions. How would you be risking your reputation if it was impossible for you to find out if you were shaving? In 8 years i've never had an email like i joined that site you recomended on this date at this time i hope you got the credit. Even if i did and checked since there will be sales on that day how could you tell if it was him? The only person in the company that would be able to find out if a shave was in place would be those at the top and they are not going to be telling anyone..

The person, I believe it was SHAP who said that i only read GFY for my info is correct, I have been building a few low key porn sites since 98 to get some extra cash whilst at university so i guess i should be more informed about things but i don't get much time to browse around, well not as much as i'd like. So i just hop on to gfy a couple of times per week to catch up on as many threads as possible. I have found many useful things here, even things that are a great help in mainstream. Looking back i wish i'd devoted more time to porn in the past.


Lets ignore the term NATS from now on, as now it has been said that it does not stop shaving (not saying NATS is not good, I like the fact it at least makes it a bit harder for shaving and is a step in the right direction in my opinion), but is it not possible to make a system like NATS that makes it impossible for webmasters to get shaved?

If it was possible to develop such system and it was not too expensive then surely over time all programs would need to use this, as there would be no good reason for them not to. I guess it?s very difficult to make things transparent and maintain privacy over specifics.

PG, Nasty and BB are the only VERY large programs that i know of, i used to use fatpockets, ARS and topbucks too. But i notice they are well.. not quite so large as they were. That's the only reason i mentioned them in my first post is not because they are the only ones that don't have a transparent sales system.

I do recall in some threads even ccbill being called into question for shaving..however that does not really seem possible. Since if i took a look at my passwd file it should match the ccbilling stats, if it didn't how would the members login? i guess ccbill could team up with the program owners so the affils would not know...but then eventually someone would blab..

I've not really understood how a program can afford to pay $40 per trial sign up. Then again i'm not a maths genius so maybe it is possible. The reason i say this is mainly because a few years ago i looked into the members area of some of the programs i was pushing and thought hmmm a few feeds and some pics (that's not meant to be a derogatory observation since in the past it seems that's all most programs had to work with). Now i'd not stay a member there for more than the trial period. A few of the smarter programs like privategold i notice pushed the "free week" but didn't mention it was tagged to the end of the first month for which you'd already paid for, (therefore you could see how they paid high for that free trial period). I think they were forced to stop using that method of advertising after a few months. Fatpockets converted like mad and i stayed with them again even though their members area was not really as excellent as you may hope for (but not bad for that time) i'm not saying they shaved either at all. However how could any place in those days pay high $ for trials. Maybe the fact they never shaved is why some are not around since that model is not workable.

Today it's true the big sites have a lot of very good content and maybe shaving is not needed so much or at all. It would seem most of you guys who know a lot more than myself are more than happy so maybe there is no need for an unshavable system to be developed now.


After just reading this post over before pressing submit i realise it is all kind of a mess but instead of writing all of that i should have just put.....


Now it's been pointed out to me that nats is not unshavable i understand fully why not all companies have been pressured into using it, and i was not refering only to the 3 companies i mentioned in my first post. I mentioned those only because they were the first ones that came to my mind...anyone who did read my first post fully would have seen i made it clear i was only asking others opinion as to whether shaving was even possible either intentionally or accidentally these days

I am not sure where you go the idea that Nats is expensive, it's actually the cheapest I've seen, which is why so many people use it...

NATS made it possible for pretty much any Tom Dick or Harry to start an affiliate program.

Custom scripts are VERY expensive and it says a lot about a company who uses them rather than Nats, means that their sites make money and they can afford the better solution. What your company can afford says a lot about your company's success. If you're buying the cheapest... well...

I would be less worried about Nasty Dollars who pays $35 on a $4.95 trial, shaving then I would about some of the Nats sites who do the same.

Bottom line is your ROI, if you aren't making more money back that you are putting into sending that affiliate traffic, find a new affiliate.

Ummmm what's that about ignorance?

You can not "take away signups" with NATS.

Nats is expensive? To who, a poor kid on mommas computer?

:thumbsup

Why were you promoting them in the first place?

Because they made you more money than other programs?

If you really feel they are shaving, are you going to become a martyr and switch to another program that converts and pays at a less rate?

There are some questions that are not worth asking.

We happen to have custom software in place as well. It isn't the easy or less expensive solution.

Unless you have proof, why don't you make your life easier and start only paying attention to the sum of your weekly checks.

One that does not shave http://fatpockets.com/

NATS is one of the more difficult affilliate program scripts to implement. And nothing is easier than just having a CCBill based affilliate program :2 cents:

You get what you pay for, and none of the above companies are paying even remotely close to that low :)

It's all a matter of doing business with people you trust.

There are ways to "shave" with any program. (Not paying on the backup processor, not paying on checking joins or web900 joins or redirecting foreign traffic on the join page to a dialer that you don't get credit for)
"Shaving" doesn't necessarily mean there's a button you push on the backend that takes a % of sales away from a webmaster.

As for which affiliate program someone uses, that doesn't really matter either. Two of the programs mentioned in the thread title use the exact same backend software that Twisty's uses.
Do you think Twisty's uses that software instead of NATS so they can shave?
I'll bet you all the money in all of my bank accounts plus the equity in my home against whatever you have in your back pocket right now that Shap has never shaved one single cent off of one single webmaster and never will.

It's all a matter of doing business with people you trust.
Pick up the phone, talk to the people who work there. Go to trade shows and meet them in person, that's how you should decide whom to do business with....not by seeing who has the highest payout per signup or the newest and greatest "shave proof" backend software or fanciest affiliate webiste design.

:2 cents:

Another thing I'd like to mention is that even though NATS says it's impossible to shave using their software and they'll publicly humiliate anyone they catch shaving by modifying the software....there are TONS of webmasters who think that's bullshit and that you can still shave with NATS.

The level of distrust is similar to what you see when people are buying a used car.
Hell I remember when I was a car salesman and people had negotiated us down to dead invoice and wanted another $500 off.
I'd walk out with the manufacturer's invoice in my hand and show them that we were selling them the car for invoice price and there was nothing left to do.
They wouldn't believe it. They'd say "we know you have 3 invoices back there and this one doesn't have the 'real' numbers on it"

That's basically the way webmasters feel about affiliate programs shaving. It wouldn't matter what affiliate software or billing processor someone used....there are still plenty of webmasters who would believe you were somehow stealing from them.

There's nothing you can do to make those people happy. They just need to start their own programs so they know that nobody is shaving them.

Then again, come to think of it, I'm sure they'd end up blaming the billing processor for stealing from them somehow.

So maybe those people should start a billing company instead.

Then again, come to think of it, they probably accuse the people they processed for of doing fraudulent signups to try and steal from them.

So maybe those people should just get tin foil hats and move to Montana.

Dumb question from a newbie :winkwink:
Joined Nasty Dollars in Jan. and was doin' around 1:1300 until mid-April.
Now it's been over 7000 uniques since my last sale :Oh crap
Is this type of 'slump' a normal thing to expect? Will I suddenly get several sales in a row to balance it all out?

I beg to differ. I noticed they weren't tracking my clicks, so I had a bunch of friends click through a bunch of my links on the site, went straight to BBO site, had my aff code, etc. BBO never tracked it.

Sup?

Custom backends work better for some :)

um, no... NATS is cheap... only $725/month for the program and backups

Yeah they are shaving and still convert better than any other porn sites lol..