I was kicking ass about a week ago... right now, not so much

my sales have been great this month

I've had a couple of sponsors just die on me, got 0 sales on cc-bill the last 3 days and AFF has sucked balls all month... Some sponsors are doing as usual thou.

It is.

Typically around the holidays, especially in the summer months, it happens. I had a decent week, but overall the month's off about 15%.

Best month ever... ;)
Finally seeing growth again...
But having ALOT of issues with chargebacks since getting both of my sites on the first page of google for some great keyterms..

Down around 30% for me this month. May has sucked hard!

What he said.

Nor do I. I think they are very real and fucking this business up for affiliates. :(

I don't think people are referring to adware/spyware as the main cause of slowing sales, but adware / spyware installers sure don't help the cause either. Even if adware / spyware cuts into 3% of my profits, that's still theft.

And, even if it is only 3% right now, what will that percentage be in two more years with the obvious SIGNIFICANT increase in adware / spyware activity in OUR industry? I mean, a decent sized portion of this industry is in that game.

So yeah....the boogeyman might be just be a bedtime story for now, but i'll tell you what...i'm still scared shitless of it.

Kastle Archives has been down a little for us, but probably only about 10-15% - not too drastic.

We chalk it up to the usual summer holiday trends. Seen it every year since '99.

Last week was above average, May was fantastic for us!

my dating is down all across the boards

but my pills are up

what he said !

And then if you don't have enough free content, how will Adult Webmasters be able to retain their surfers? The surfers will all go to the torrent sites instead.

3%? Your kidding, right? Zango by itself would run 3% without a blink - and there are hundreds of others out there. Don't be shocked if 30-50% of all of your surfers have some sort of spyware on them. What percentage of those are stealing signups? Who knows?

My concerns are (a) signups hijacked to another affiliate code, and (b) surfers jerked away from one signup page and sent to anther program signup page entirely, possibly as part of a identity theft. In both cases, it means that me as an affiliate won't get paid for a signup.

I hope that next week the programs and the CC processors are more willing to come to the table and discuss the issues.

Sales took a dip since school has gotten out. That means less credit card wielding college students. With out any hard evidence I always thought the summer slowdown was attributable to this plus people do more traveling at this time of year.

But yes, my sales are down slightly from last month while traffic is relatively the same.

-A

summertime = slowdown

Sales are lower than usual for me this week too. My ratios this week are 3 times higher than they were in previous weeks. If my ratios were normal this would have been my best week ever. Ah well, here's to next week :)

i understand that you have a join date which is some time ago and many many posts, but i respectfully disagree

you are saying that 3% of your traffic is zango. i believe the business model of companies like zango make their $$ of of a very thin but broad slice of consumers. i doubt any single spyware/adware company has 3% share of adult consumers-perhaps hooper or 12clicks could comment more on this


aggregately, they could be on many of your users computers, but each company would have to have their spyware set up to specifically leach your specific traffic

so while i agree that those companies are scumbags, i think you are exaggerating the issue

A little down but, this is porn...it always goes up again. Every business type has the odd slow patch.

I was down 50% 3 weeks ago... I feel your pain. :(

Zango's own numbers - 200,000 new users PER DAY, which would be 73 million users per year.

The important thing isn't Zango by itself - but the huge numbers of toolbar and spyware companies out there tagging traffic in various ways.

From 2005: http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P3309

The numbers are staggering.

sure, but in their best interest to show big numbers, they just dont tell you how many uninstalls happen every day

thats like saying a paysite that gets 100 joins a day, should have 35k+ members within a year

and again, im not saying that a lot of people dont have spyware on their computer, im just saying your going a little overboard when you say that zango is stealing, at a minimum of 3% of your traffic

Last week was the best week I've had ever!!!



JUST KIDDING! Thought for sure someone would have said that line by now.
I think it is the holiday weekend, combined with people getting out of school, the gas prices AND, ESPECIALLY AND, the FREE PORN you can get with torrents etc etc.

Why pay for porn when you are getting the very same porn on a site FREE at a torrent site?

My own server stats show a pretty high penetration of zango "reported" (about 1%) and since they are (a) not the biggest, and (b) not always announcing zango or their other brands - I have to assume that a fair bit of traffic is being fucked with on a regular basis.

I think, as an example, that it would be stunningly easy for someone to create a spyware program that detects calls to CCbill's click program, and does a substitution - or even redirects the surfer to another similar site (or even general porn).

If you think that is only 3%, well... you might want to take off the rose colored glasses and surf around for a while. The number of people infected with some sort of spyware is HUGE! Remember all those codec installers? The Iframe guys? It's endless.

I would really like to hear from the processing companies on all of this. Since it is a holiday, I can always bump this back up for them on Tuesday.

It isn't fucking ZANGO!! It's people not buying....plain and simple.

And you are going way underborad :winkwink:

I think more than anything it is a combination of things. But scrubbing this last week seems to be apparent.

Funny to see the spamming affiliate programs in this thread sales are up up up. LOL but affiliates are saying way way down. Could that be that a few affiliates are getting many sign ups from urls other than there own. Yep. The honest companies that I talk to say they are having to ban these accounts each and every month. I don't think all programs are doing this.

Anyways yes it isn't only Zango. But spyware, adware, trojans, and torrents are a part of this.

rawalex, alexa stats for zango are high, but still only .1% or less of internet users, per their criteria

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...url=zango.com/

what do the processors have to do with it? may as well blame the hosting companies or microsoft. you are talking about software on the endusers computer that can do anything its commanded to do.

the only thing that i can think of that can really help is making sure that consumers utilize and have access to good remover software/services, and i have thought about this for some time.

if you have a better idea, lets hear it

when the yearly sales slump hit, people have a tendency to stretch when they are looking for causes

this time of year sucks

For Zango and Alexa: That number is based only on people with the alexa toolbar installed - many spyware packages purposely REMOVE other toolbars or disable them.

Since you are using Alexa, consider this:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...url=thehun.net

That is Zango versus The Hun - A million plus visits per day? Zango is fucking huge - and they are only one of probably 10 top tier toolbars and then thousands of lower end pure spyware products. The scale is beyond comprehension, and sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won't make it go away.

As for the processors, there is two very different things at play: First off, I would be very interested to see if they track browser settings to spot things like Zango or coolwebproduct / webfun / smilies (yes, those are all toolbar installers!). I would be very interested to see if they are looking closely at conversions and checking for things like high percentage of toolbar installs, high percentage of "no refering URL" and stuff like that. I would be very interested to see if the guys holding the bank for most of the programs are actually doing something to protect programs and affiliates from this problem.

On a completely different tack, I would also love to see a "processing index" - a number (say 1 to 100) each day that represents the volumes of things like actual sales, actual rebills, actual attempted sales, failures, and things like that as a global overall for the industry. Even a program with access to their own numbers has no way to know if they are part of an induistry trend (say failures are up, sales are down) or if it is something of thier own doing. I would thnk that many programs and affiliates have tuned their stuff aware from the best settings because of something outside of their control.

Basically, getting an idea of the health of the most important part of the business (relative sales levels) would help everyone to get on the good track. I don't want to know exactly how many sales are going on, but it an average day is a "50", and the rating for today is 25, then I know that sales are down overall and I won't worry about my own stuff as much. If it is a 75 or 80 and my sales suck for days at a time, then I know that perhaps I need to change what I am selling or my methods...

I guess I am hoping to get a feeling that the programs and the processors are on top of the situation and looking out for their business partners (affiliates) and making sure that we aren't getting screwed over. I am not comfortable that this is the situation today.

For my best converting sponsor, this has been my best month yet with them. Sales are down alittle but rebills are great with them!

webmasterchecks: You obviously don't have a clue about how big a problem malware is, sounds to me like you are in denial.

You guys got to understand that these guys building commercial viruses spreading malware is far beyond any of the virus makers of the past that just spread viruses to damage systems. These guys got entire crews working on every possible exploit that they can find and write malware that morphs itself to the system so that it is virtually undetectable. Antivirus companies are so far behind these guys that it is frightening. Zango is nothing in this context, most of the malware you will never realize that you have on your system, they don’t pop shit or redirect sites, they only gather information and change affiliate codes. My estimates based on statistical models for sales on both mainstream and adult sites suggest that 50-80% of adult sales are getting stolen. Mainstream is lower, mainly because adult has been so good at helping these guys out.

There Is Only One Reason:

Too Much Free Porn.


:321GFY

Normally I would say "yeah, too much free porn", but I have to say the numbers don't back it up. If that was the case, people wouldn't click thru, they wouldn't take the tour, they wouldn't go all the way to the join pages. They would be off enjoying free porn. Sponsor click rates (from my own numbers, not theirs) are actually UP from this time last year as a percentage of ads and links shown. The ratios of people being "qualified" or "join page hits" as reported by the sponsors seems normal.

But there are no sales.

There is a blockage in the plumbing, somewhere after that point.

This whole month was just terrible.

:(

:thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup

April was best month ever for me
May conversions dropped like hell

Now my fucking site is down too..The same day that I updated hoping for sales to go up...GOTDAMMIT!...If the dude who just bought a $99.99 membership charges back, I'm gonna be hella pissed.

Last week of the month is never good.