Just to add in what happened with TwistysCash - yes we went to v4 and then went back to v3.

We didn't do it because v4 sucked or didn't work, or was too slow or anything like that at all. We did it because of the same reasons as Selena and a lot of other people in this post are referring to: It's a little too different from v3.

We have been running nats3 for a long time and have not only been happy with it, but we've also built our business processes, management systems, pricing options, customer support, basically EVERYTHING around Nats3 :)

Doing the upgrade from v3 to v4, we thought our existing business processes etc could have been easily imported into v4 - that was not the case at all and we had to roll back. We're going to regroup and try a more gradual approach so we can change our business processes so they will work smoothly with Nats4.

Nats4 has way better stats, better control, better security and way better tools for affiliates - although as Nurgle and others point out, they're not totally user friendly yet ;) We definitely want to take advantage of these improvements, we'll just have to go about it in a different manner.

So! To answer your question Jact in the most long-winded way possible :1orglaugh I believe setting up your program in Nats4 to begin with is the better route to go. You will have made your business processes based on a more robust system without have to revisit them at a later date if you did it on Nats3

Hope that helps!

We're in the process of upgrading to NATS4, think we'll hold off a little bit. Maybe send a mailer to our affiliates and see what they want.

I have in the past i have even given them ideas on how to make their script better for all webmasters want to know what they told me, they would charge me for the idea. No offense Brad you have a great reputation but NATS/TMM is still the best option in a non competitive market. If someone came in with something really well programmed and designed to scale, to handle increasing sales thru tour and site implementation then they would dominate quickly. (Just as NATS was ahead of its competition and dominated)

This is it! I know this isn't incredibly helpful to developers.. BUT

I love the simplicity of V3, it wasn't broken so don't try to fix it! :thumbsup

As a program that's running both NATS3 and NATS4, I believe that NATS4 has the better options to make you more money.

With that said. There are a lot of things that I do not like with NATS4.

I would have expected that features that were in NATS3 be in NATS4, but I was mistaken.

I do agree though that the webmaster area is a little rough, and editing any of those templates is a pain in the ass.

I would say that NATS4 needs another year or so before it's ready to completely replace NATS3.


OVERALL NATS4 > NATS3

We of course hear everyone on this. And the bottom line seems to be "you over complicated it". While many love it, many also hate it.

We'll have "simpler" very soon, in a few ways and I believe everyone will be happy.

As well as a number of things I've talked to a number of you about fixed on the "fancy" templates.

i wonder how many people in this thread have looked at the CCBill WMS system, you cant beat ccbill sponsors when you have these nats programs that have not been paying out

While CCbill is reliable in paying out, I personally make a lot less with those programs that limit themselves to ccBill as their only processor. Every single program I have used over the years, who has added a cascading billing option to supplement their ccbill account, has increased almost immediately in conversions versus when they were on CCbill by itself. Of the 200+ programs in my Stats Remote, no one has worse conversion ratios than those on ccBill only. For me personally, I won't even bother with ccBill only programs moving forward, no matter how nice the sites are.

As good as CCBill is and as much as I doubt they're going anywhere anytime soon putting all of your eggs in one basket as an affiliate or program owner is never a good idea. Plus, as a program owner, the flexibility an independent system offers will allow you to increase your revenue greatly which, in the end results in more money for the affiliate also.

Sure NATS programs can have payment issues, CCBill programs can screw you over in ways too. Processors (never CCBill that I can recall) have missed payments also. You shouldn't never trust all of your livelihood to one company. And as an affiliate you shouldn't be signing up to a program ONLY because they run CCBill or ONLY because they run NATS (or any other system).

Unfortunately many of the small niche websites don't have cascade billing as an option.

I am however seriously considering moving away from programs with a single processor myself. I have had programs with worse conversion ratios than CCBill but I didn't have them for long!

john, i understand you need to support nats, but a good number of sponsors that have stopped sending checks out recently and on top of everything else, that scares the hell out of me

after strapon cash went belly up, i was done with that

at least with ccbill, they wont send a sponsors money out until after their affiliates have gotten paid

Oh, I know. But at the same time, I think it says something about the health of their program. That is, I think it costs what.. $1500 for a NATS install and then $150 / month on the lease program for up to 200 or so members? The cash program doesn't need to be fancy... a simple logo or a splash page and just use the default NATS affiliate interface.

Really, if a company cannot afford <$2000 for a webmaster program with multiple billing processors, I am not sure they have sufficient bankroll to properly fund their program's initial growth.

**I could be mistaken on figures here... but i think those are pretty close ballpark numbers.

Yes, however strap on cash going belly up is not a reason to assume you shouldn't promote a solid company such as SilverCash because they use NATS. There are both strong and weak companies that use NATS and CCBill.

A CCbill program can screw you over in many ways also. You should be using the best programs of all back ends.

Not too far off on the #s :)

The normal cost of NATS now is $750 upfront and $150/mo for up to 300 new joins per month (not counting rebills). The lease tiers then scale up from there.

(very shameless plug)
This month we're also waiving the $750 upfront fees so you can get started for just $150/mo.

why would a business drop 2k on something thats not essential? i see people using this argument, but a) its not essential to use nats to start a new program and b) i can come up with many ways i can get a better ROI with $2,000

with $2,000 these days i can be headlining sponsor at the next Internext vegas show

I think your Internext sponsorship costs are way off, LOL. I know you were just trying to make a point tho :)

The amount of extra tools and options you have running NATS, or any other independent backend as compared to a biller's built in back end is huge. You are handcuffing yourself by not having the proper tools to run your business. The advantages you gain are far far above the costs. We wouldn't be where we are if that weren't the case.

v4 is time consuming for affiliates. at moments way too much... i'd stick to v3.

What do you find overly time consuming outside of getting FHG dumps. Any feedback is very much appreciated. We never get enough of it.

This has turned into a really, really interesting thread.

fair enough, what would be interesting to see is whether you can show that nats gets a program an extra 2k in sales over a year, for instance, over and above what ccbill offers for free

it would be an interesting graph to see if that is in fact the case, it would sell me better than the "we have more features" thing, show me that the 2k extra cost of for nats was well spent and im getting it back with sales

We simply have different ideas about what is essential. For me, an essential part of any program is cascading billing. I perceive this as showing a commitment to affiliates, and investment to their affiliates if you will, by doing what they can to provide multiple processors to allow for maximum conversions. I don't think 2k is an unreasonable expense for this.

you were aware that both epoch and ccbill now offer free affiliate software with cascading?

Certainly it can be offered, but unless it is stated clearly on the program's affiliate page, it is not obvious otherwise. Unless a CCbill program clearly states their cascading ability, then I just personally move on. It's not like there isn't a plethora of programs out there these days from which to choose, albeit the number of quality of programs is relatively small.

It's great. You are better off starting with 4, since you won't need to port anything over.

jact: objectively speaking, moving to NATS4 now will likely save you as ton of grief further down the road when you do move to v4, were to you start with 3. No question that NATS will want to move people off 3 and onto 4 so as to support a single version moving forward. It's my understanding that the migration path isn't an easy one.

From an affiliate's point of view, some like, some hate it. I'm in the later camp in terms of disliking the fhg aspect of v4.

@Scorecash: not to throw you under the bus. However, although your nats4 is a nice implementation, it's hateful to sit and wait for for each "dump" to finally spit out the info. Click, wait..... wait.. finally get a page of galleries, then have to click and wait, wait, wait for the dump form to appear. And then you can enjoy waiting again while the dump actually processes. And what's troublesome is that even as slow as this process is, I'll bet you guys run on some seriously nice hardware. It's irritating to wait for these dumps when they were so quickly available on v3..

I like v3 from a sponsor point of view, just a few tools I'd like to see fixed up, and added to v3 that in my head seem like no brainers, although it might be harder than I think since I've never looked at the source code.

1. FLV embeds in the adtools
2. Banners better organized then getting stuck in those odd categories, and a link to just see all organized by dimensions.
3. Ability for affiliates to track seperate tour stats for a single site.

Now CARMA I could write you an award winning list of features it should have. Took 2 years to get my CARMA sites how I like, but it needs a few more features to take it all the way.

That's definitely a template issue. I tweaked our templates to display full URLs on the referrer url reports.

Thanks John and Fred for taking the time to discuss with me my concerns and issues with NATS 3 vs NATS 4. I am very confident that HomegrownVideo will be able to make NATS 4 work for them, especially with the ability to customize, customize, customize.

Keep your eyes open for HomegrownVideo's new (PUBLIC!) cash program coming soon.

Think you just saved yourself from a lawsuit right there!

John, is a stand up guy!!! I love Nats and I'm sure once all these small issues are fixed V4 will be more than great. I'm sure it takes time to get used to but we'll all adapt sooner or later. :thumbsup

What sort of time frame are you looking at to say fix the FHG dumps?

Also can I ask why the actual interface was changed so much?

Excellent! Great to hear.

Hopefully all the other v4 progs will make sure the referrers are nice and long.

First thing to check would be KEY's and INDEX's and if common sense is used in the tables, next thing is to check your BIN LOGS (turn them on if they are off) to see the common queries and then have someone analyze it for you in case you are not able to do it yourself.

I don't know about CARMA, but haven't seen anything alarming on NATS before, spending hundreds of hours on debugging databases and queries seems somewhat high for the complexity TMM usually use in their databases , I hope your host didn't bill your per hour for that because then your where paying for someone to learn not to fix :)

here is my take on NATS v4 , nothing that I haven't spoken with John or many of his staff about.

1. it's DB structure is far, far superior. If you run a big program on a non-custom SQL structure and have issues with NATS v3, V4 is your answer.

2. I've noticed while some things are nicer to admin with, most of the admin experience in v3 is nicer ( This could be just being used to one thing, but thats make take with over 20 installs. )

3. with some things not yet compatible ( more to say, clients custom script / addons ) one thing about v4 that isn't addressed and isn't really NATS fault, is the roll out. You're talking about re-making alot of stuff that has been done and potentially having to pay developers a hefty ransom for them to upgrade it, since they know you need it.

4. i think NATS needs to just be broken into two forks. IMO, nats v3 is still a great option for alot of us, many companies have put alot of blood sweat and tears into v3 alongside nats techs and that is alot of stuff to just turn away from. If this isn't agreeable to NATS as is, maybe a group of us could pitch in some amount of money in extra development support to continue this way. As I think saying no more tool dev on v3 makes sense for NATS, it's not exactly what every program wants to hear.

5. NATS needs to address alot of the affiliate concerns ( i'm sure they are ) but I say this b/c as a program, no one is looking to move into something people don't like. that's a fact.

we love NATS, as in love it, beyond any other backend, even custom ones we've seen, for adult, its the best possible option out there.

As an affiliate I cannot even enter my payee name in the second screen while signing up with a new sponsor because of a dot and a a hyphen in the name. I don't understand the need to restrict characters in the Payee name - this is one field that most people will be extra careful to enter accurately so the validation is counter productive.

This situation reminds me to windowsxp/windows vista situation-they should start working on nats5 which will be fast as nats3 and have features like nats4.

Good points.

1) It's true, the DB structures (and queries) of NATS3 and CARMA were / are fairly - very unoptimised. From the code snippets I've seen of both, there was / is a huge room for improvement in both coding structures and techniques.. hopefully 4 has addressed those.

I'd say that NATs3 development is coming to the end of its development cycle, simply because of its coding framework (or lack thereof) - so I'm assuming that was the purpose of 4.

4) It's very true - I know just between your programs and ours, we'd have thousands upon thousands of lines of code that are built off / extending NATs3 / CARMA.

I personally wouldn't move anything onto 4 for at least 12-18 months, until it reaches maturity.

John, Do you guys still sell V3 ? I have a client who wants to buy it this month to take advantage of your free install / free training offer but after reading all this i like them to go with v3

Jay

Bad management. :2 cents: