Then they shouldn't advertise themselves as "$5BILLION PER ****TRIAL**** SIGNUP! FLAT! NO RATIOS!"

This whole "this business is cutthroat so it's okay to steal" shit is lame. Hate to tell everyone, but it's not okay to steal because you're in a competitive business. Not sure where that retarded idea even originated. It's all rationalization in order to make thieves feel better about themselves.

So what about partnership programs then too, is there an incentive or desire for them to shave other than greed ?

BV.

twice today you've claimed knowledge that a webmaster using a third party processor's revshare/partnership software can shave signups.

I read your excuse for not revealing what you know, or claim to know, and it was weak.

I also think IBILL, CCBILL, GLOBILL, JETTIS etc should speak up on this, defend their software if they can.

Many webmasters do throw their traffic at revshare programs because they believe that they will get the fairest shake from somebody using third party software they can't tamper with.

If it's not so, you would be doing many more webmasters a favor revealing what you know than harm by giving out info that might lead somebody to use the info you give out to screw over people.

I think if a company deals with a big enough volume of traffic and is prepared to deal with the fraud and poor convertions along with the good soild 3-4 month retentions. Then they can run a persignup program without stealing from a webmaster. If they tell you $35 a signup then they should be prepared to do that. If they say $35 persignup for the signups that we feel you earned then they turn on the Mach3 Percision adjuster

How logistically possible is it for them to pay per-signup on a sliding scale based on productivity without needing to shave ?

Even if they could I doubt any of them would. They're thinking shorter term now rather than long term. It's easier to get all the traffic, offer higher payouts than they should, and upsell much of it to the other larger paysites than it is to work on their own membership retention. Less risk for them because they don't have to worry as much about retention. You see them cross-billing more and more now, with the extra checkboxes to get them signed up at other sites at the same time.

while I agree with this, one thing you have to think about is...the affiliates...how many sign up for a revshare program? most flock to the per signups, no matter how outrageous the claims...they accuse program owners of being shortsighted, when THEY are the shortsighted ones...going for the one time, fast up front payout as opposed to building a steady income...

While revshare programs can certainly shave, there is less incentive because a webmaster is truly being paid what their traffic is worth...

I'm not slamming PPS signups as a whole (we send to some as well) it's just that they would be more pre-disposed to it...

ok, if I opened a per signup program and had the terms "$35 per signup, but if your ratios suck ass, we reserve the right to terminate you" affiliates would freak out and avoid joining en masse....as they should as there is no way to prove what the ratios truly were...

bottomline, trust who you're sending your traffic to or don't send it....

:glugglug

yup, we even toyed with the idea of crossbilling, but decided against it...

I love the idea of conversion based per signup...hmmm, might be worth looking in to......

I agree with you about who the short sighted people are.

But I don't think the fact that big shiny letters that say "$50 PER SIGNUP" attracts people means it's okay to steal. ;)

There is no other business around where you can make outright lies and get away with it.

Ford can't tell you their cars will last for 500 years and make you breakfast every morning. That would certainly increase their sales.

Pepsi can't say that drinking Pepsi reduces the risk of cancer and each time you open a pepsi a $5 bill appears in your wallet. Again, that would increase sales.

It's too bad the pay per signup programs are victims of their own stupidity by promising what they can't deliver. But that doesn't mean it's okay for them to steal in order to appear to fulfill those promises.

And yes. ;) A good partnership program is the best thing there is around. :) I have rebills up into the 35+ month range on some sites now. It's nice getting paid for a page I built 3+ years ago. hehe.

Very good point. I only work per signup for the reason that I don't want the risk factor. As a search engine marketer, I want a guaranteed flat rate. I'm willing to forgo some profits for a fixed rate. If the adult company can retain those members for a long time, then congrats to them, they deserve to keep the extra profit. If it means I come under the shave, so be it. For many webmasters, they don't want to wait for months to get the total value from a customer. For me, my business is to lead people from the search engine to the adult company. Once they've converted it's the adult companies responsibility to retain them as long as possible and since i have no influence or control over this factor, I insist on per signup. I'm not bashing revshare, I'm just saying that per signup is a more viable option for those webmasters who want to minimize risk.

WG

What he said

we don't shave and we have a model of our own.
thats $1 memberships for a month the surfer doesn't feel pressured to cancel and we have enough content to last a life time.

our payout might not be high but its fare $25 per dollar trial.
so it comes down to conversions to track your traffic and what you make at the end of the day.

We don't shave cause we know how to convert traffic to trial and trial to active and then retention.

We have always focused on Paysites for 7 years and we have also lost our ass using certain processors before on free trials but we never shaved. we just switched our model and tweaked shit till we profited but we never fucked the webmaster for our misstakes.

so test us out and let us make you the money you deserve.

fuck it if you don't convert well I will reverse shave and credit joins

Rock on

Not all sponsors cheat

what would you do if one webmaster's traffic had 1/10th the conversions from trial to monthly than the normal rate? 1/20th? 1/50?

I'm not slamming your program (hell, we're sending a smattering of exits there) I'm just curious as to how one deals with something like this....

lol, 3-4 month retention for most big sites is being GENEROUS! If they actually tried to retain maybe they wouldnt have to shave :thumbsup

If we have a webmaster that has a very high chargeback or when they all cancel on the trial we know we are being screwed so we contact them and try to help them promote us better or if its just fraud most of the time they don't responed
and we shut there acount off.

But it depends on many things, I have never turned anyone off yet for bad traffic on P4D/freefreeprogram only the scammers.
Knock on wood

In the past with other programs we always paid them out but told the webmaster to pull there traffic.
or if I wasn't converting I would let them know to pull there traffic till I tweaked everything and made them the most I could.
Ask anyone

hopefully that made sence

I posted this in the other thread about shaving.

a big reason why i go to per sign up instead of revshare is i want to see the members area for revshare. most members area's suck shit and you don't find out until you start making 2 bux a sign up over the past week or so. its bs.

yes there is =)

this is quite humurous to see some of the things people write here without thinking before they type.... for that matter, without doing simple calculations or knowing industry-standard statistics.... that's all i will say on this matter....

Ditto! ;) Are you getting shy on us Kman? lol

You didn't really say anything yet.
Speak up.

...and if a member's area is shit with a PPS and they just shave you 1 of every 4-5 signups.......?

After all is said and done nothing will come out of this. Dollars4all may have to close up shop and come back under a diferent name, but that's only cuz he's small. How many times has CEN been caught with it's hand in the cookie jar and not a damn thing happened? I remember when they were declining perfectly good credit cards, then redirecting the surfer ( with credit card and dick still in hand ) to sites where he could sign up, but the refering webmaster would not get credit for the join. People talked about it for a day or two, then the subject was dropped and CEN just kept on keeping on.
What the webmasters of today need is more disgruntled employees from big sponsors.

I have noticed this.

With ccbill/ibill revshare sites the number of transactions is normally steady.

With per sign up places I find crazy swings, no sign ups for days then suddenly lots. Much more up and down.

Mutt,

I made that 1 post yesterday. I also gave NO excuses about revealing or not revealing, so I have no idea what you are talking about.

Actually that's the reason I made the post. Do webmasters a favor as you say. I also was trying to make the point that anyone can shave if they want. Some more likely than others. For me it's the last thing in the world I want to do or any smart & decent business man would want to do. You want your webmasters to be happy so they can keep sending traffic and also maybe spread the word to their friends. In order to do that you can't shave them!

I have a very small but loyal amount of webmasters that make money and have been with me for quite a long time.

BUT I have no where near the amount that affiliates with a larger per sign up program seem to have.

Sadly it is true what Kimmy Kim says and most webmasters already know; that the masses flock to the big "advertized" pay out sponsors.

Same rules apply to adult biz as in real life: (You don't get something for nothing.) Why would it be any different here?



But anyways with that out of the way,here is one way:
http://www.bikinivoyeur.com/ccbill-cap.gif



Cheers!
BV

NOBODY shaves....shaving is politically incorrect term.
it's now called:
network outage
d/b glitch
"we were down but were counting all your sign ups anyway"
"we are honest, but the programmer who wrote the software is not"
"we never cum in your mouth since 1995"

Hahaha, Serge, too bad everybody doesn't use MKStats, it would be so much easier ;)

WOW so you can say, turn off revshare after 3 rebills.. Hmmm

Andre

Are the billing companys(ibill,ccbill,epoc,etc.) awear of "shaving". If they are not, should'nt they be made awear? Im sure if we made a big public stink about it, somthing would be done.

If I were a billing company and a big player would come to me and tell me,

"hey I bring 200 sign ups a day to a site you provide billing for, I believe thay are shaving my income. If you dont investigate Ill gladly send my traffic to another site with another billing provider"

I would definatly investigate!!!

My :2 cents:

Later

I think you were actually confusing me and BV, my partner.

That's one way to shave (rebills) - any programmer worth his salt also knows ways to shave initial signups and anything else you like with CCBill/IBill.

And no, I'm still not giving details. I could care less whether you believe me or not.

Cheers,
Backov

I'm about to post some things that aren't going to be popular but .......

(Almost) All programs shave (not saying all so I am not libel)

Look back at the history of the adult internet, Click through programs stated in 1996 - they were paying in the .03 per click range
The next wave of click through programs came along and raised the per click to .05, they wanted to get the traffic that was being sent to already existing programs so they offered a higher payout and shaving started . It was in the form of counting unique clicks instead of raw click or second page clicks - it was all smoke and mirrors, program A saying I'll pay you more than program B and then shaving to offset the difference
Other programs came along offering more per click (anyone remember Xpics and .30 per click Sundays) and shaving increased - Xpics shaved terrible but still was the highest earning program at the time

Webmasters want to earn as much money as possible and at times are drawn to what looks to be the highest paying offer - on the surface which deal are you going to take $80 per join or $35 per join?

The important thing is your (Per Click) earnings - that's obviously the way to measure Program A against Program B and see where you really earn the most - you send 10K clicks to program A and earn X, same 10K click to program B and earn Y
or what you earn per mailer (Program A earns 5K with this mailer and Program B earns 12K with the same mailer) or how much a particular spot on your site(s) earns - 1 week in the top banner slot of your XYZ sites earns X with Program A and Program B earns Z in the next week

I'm not saying shaving is right, I'm saying it is done every day in (almost) every program and it's done to attract webmasters like yourself to send traffic to that program - smoke and mirrors. Program A says we'll pay you $40 per join then program B comes along and says we'll pay you $50 per join and the shave happens

Do the math for yourself - Most sites convert about 30%-40% from trial to membership (sure I'll hear something about this) and the the average member only stays 3 months (or less) - so to make those competitive payouts of $40-$100 per join there has to be shaving, cross sells and up sells

The positive now is I'm starting to see more pay sites that are becoming concerned with the quality of the product they opffer

In fact I'll do something that I think no other sponsor will do here
I'm going to tell you my program Cloud 9 Cash http://www.cloud9cash.com shaves and I'll explain how it's done
I use CCbill for the affiliate program - I use a cookie based tracking system- affiliates lose about 10% of joins due to cookies not being accepted - to offset that I pay 60% off all sales and Cloud 9 Cash pays the processing fees for all affiliates (the % you normally pay to the processing company Cloud 9 Cash pays for you) so after all is said and done you get 60% or more from Cloud 9 Cash and I pay for the entire lifetime of the subscriber. Affiliates who promote my sites have surfers who have been members for over a year
Also any affiliate in the Cloud 9 Cash program can get a free access to the sites so they can see what they are promoting


Flame away if you feel the need - I've laid out the big picture from 5 years in the business and from a the perspective of a paysite and affiliate program owner - will this hurt my business - maybe - did I pull back the curtain a little - I hope so

Best wishes to all
Vick

1995 sounds exactly like the glory days of organized crime before the RICO act

Unless someone is being paid on clicks, it DOES NOT MATTER what the click count is. People bitching about shaving clicks are whining pointlessly.

Proxies take away clicks, how unique ips are measured can take away clicks, a page that does not load fully can take away clicks, all kinds of things can take away clicks. How the count is taken, raw, unique, first page, second page, all these things affect clicks...

The bottom line -- the ONLY line -- is what is on the check in the amount space.

Send 1k clicks to A and 1k clicks to B. Who paid you more for the 1k clicks?

The rest is irrelevant, completely irrelevant. All this conversions this, counters that, is just fluff or people who don't understand the business model here.

And I am not going to start on the subject of cheating thieving resellers that was touched on earlier, other than to say THEY cost honest resellers more money than cheating sponsors ever have.

I guess they cant , they intice you in the door with the huge payouts, then fuck you because they cant live up to the hype !

The way to go with any upsell , or partner program is , month to month recurring, paid and tracked by a 3rd party biller.

The problem is that clicks are shaved to hide signup shaving and keep conversion ratios looking realistic.

This attitude is why shaving exists. If webmasters actually cared that they were dealing with crooks, the crooks wouldn't exist. To quote Labret: "We promise we won't fuck you again."

This sounds to me like you are defending shaving, not a position I expected you to take. So, us honest webmasters deserve to be defrauded (shaved is such a friendly term for a felony) - thousands of dollars because of cheating webmasters?

The way I read this is that you are saying fraudulent webmasters are the cause of shaving in sponsors, and that they are costing us money, not the criminals. Perhaps you would care to elaborate on this a bit?

Cheers,
Backov

There are many ways how programs using third-party revshare programs can 'shave'... but what is actually considered shaving, where does it start?

1. As Vick said... you might lose 10%+ due to surfers that have cookies disabled.

2. As BV said... they might stop paying for rebills after a certain number of months.

3. They might offer alternative billing options which you don't get credit for.

4. They might have a backup processor, so if the surfer's credit card is rejected by the default processor, they send him to the backup processor's signup page and you don't get credit for it.

5. They might redirect certain traffic to a dialer which you don't get credit for.

6. They might have a 'dynamic' join page... e.g. ip/country based payment options which you don't get credit for.

7. They might give their members a special deal for another site once they joined, so they cancel and join the other site which you don't get credit for.

I could go on an on...

Liken it to shoplifting Backov, that should be an easy enough analogy...

I've worked in major corporations before, and big business -- EVERY business has its own form of the shave -- whether its kickbacks or discounts to certain clients, numbers juggling, the list goes on.

I am not defending it or judging it.

I simply accept the system the way it exists and I work within that framework.

And the one that pays me the most for that 1k clicks gets my traffic.

reading through this thread I guess what I really see the most of is webmaster saying pay us what your program claims to be paying (don't shave)

What I'd like to see if you can is how you would set up a proram that profitably pays $50 per trial join

Good point bro...


Keep on Rockin'

setgo.com certainly makes one think and analysis...
I especially like the archives... http://setgo.com/archives.html


Keep on Rockin'

then i usually don't stick around long

Solid readable thread. Up we go...

I love to be quoted. :thumbsup

Brad

great thread ;]

you need a fucking job.

ShaVe on YoU

I shave my whole body, head to toe. not buzz, shave with a Gillette...Is that gay?

Nowadays some people think Labret is a myth.

i shave only my beard... :pimp