Why didn't TMM (nats) paysite CMS never took off?
 

TMM developed a paysite CMS called CARMA. For some reason it never got as popular as ElevatedX for example.

What gives? Since their other product (NATS) is pretty successful.

My thoughts are that ElevatedX already held most of the current NATS customers and many are satisfied and do not want to change... then you have the new ones who already hear so many great things about Elevated and the lack of things about Carma.

Yeah but TMM have a good developer team, they could make CARMA at least as good as EvelatedX, if not better.

Have you ever looked at the other major CMS in our industry?
MAS (http://mansionproductions.com/mas/) is out there since 2003 when both Carma and Elevated-X did not exist; created by the company who made the first affiliate management software with cascading billing MPA3

Both programs have powered thousands of sites and have been constantly improving through the years, also praised by numerous awards.

You may check what some of our current customers have to say about MAS: http://mansionproductions.com/mas/testimonials.html

If you are interested, fill in the contact form on the site, or shoot me an email to ross [at] mansionproductions.com and I will give you access to the online demo, references to sites etc.

And it may be already. Which is kind of my point.

The systems are not comparable and there's a pretty big divide. The money to justify major development just isn't there like it was a few to several years ago. If Elevated X didn't already have the market position and momentum we have, we wouldn't be doing it either. The ROI isn't the same as it was when the older systems were introduced to market.

Some of why the older systems like Carma and MAS fell off the map a few years ago is factors like increased competition, the changing economy and changes to our industry. The MAS guys or anyone else can spam forum threads like this one all they want - but the reality is that they will have to work extremely hard and spend a ton of money on both ongoing/constant development and support staff in order to capture enough of the adult industry's CMS market share to make it worth their while.

Funny. I was just on the phone with Ed earlier talking about this very statement.

I bought (leased) Carma thinking "it's from TMM so it must be great"

Carma came out of the box really ugly looking and very annoying and counter intuitive to set up.

I tried to find developers and designers who could work with it and there was just no one. Eventually I gave up. I was just starting out and had no idea how to do anything myself. I could probably get it done now but why lease it when I have other licenses outright for superior software.

Carma is/was really bloated and a massive mysql hog as all the templates to render were stored in the database. So rendering a single page could make 100+ db calls. Have a few hundred visitors a second to a tour and your server ground to a halt very quickly.
Only way around that,was for a cron job to create static HTML. Pfffft.

Yes I looked. MAS is crap.

Sorry.

Once you had everything setup in the CARMA system, it worked well but setting it up was the largest pain in the ass. So time consuming and everything by hand.

I haven't used it in over six years, so I'm not sure if they ever made changes/upgrades.

Btw, missed seeing you post borked, glad you are back. :)

You're the only one that noticed I was gone! Touching. Back and hey, I turned green!

As a consumer I recently chose a CMS and we are porting all our sites over right now, for me it was easy to choose elevated X, it was programmed into me over the past few years that when I change that is where I am going, tbh I couldn't tell you why, probably all the good feedback burnt into my brain.

Congrats on the 10k posts - knew YOU could do it!!! :upsidedow :thumbsup :winkwink:

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instanc...x/21365808.jpg

GFY has been Borked (again)... :1orglaugh

:stoned

ADG

good thread

Marcus - I cannot recall ever giving you access (IP Restricted) to our MAS V2, nor every chatting with you giving you any access to MAS. How can you then say it is "crap" when you clearly have not seen it? Other intentions with this post?

AJ - We know you like to think that your main CMS competitor (MAS/Mansion) "has fell off the map" - but it is far far from the truth, and we power thousands of sites on MAS, as you do. We move sites over to MAS all the time, from ElevatedX, Carma, SiteDepth and others. And more have come recently with the newly released MAS V2 (now at Version 2.0.4) - http://mas.mansionproductions.com/v2/. Once we passed beyond that major milestone of releasing our true version 2, we can now jump forward in a fast pace releasing new updates every month. We do have a long list of scheduled features in the pipe and no, having a good foundation to build on, the ongoing development does not cost a fortune.

As for
If it was not worth our while, we would not have been in business, nor bothered upgrading MAS. We are still one of the two (you being the other) largest providers of adult CMS, and this will not change any time soon. We have a equal or better product, more reasonable to acquire/invest in (our pricing is overall better than ElevatedX on RENT (yes, we will waive any license fee for anyone moving from ElevatedX to MAS V2), and we also have a PURCHASE option that many companies prefer over renting. Our support is beyond the best in the industry, twist it how you want to... So rest assured that we are not going anywhere, and we will be serving the adult industry for CMS for years to come.

I worked for someone whose paysites were on MAS. Not sure if it was MAS 1 or MAS 2, but it was pretty bad.

You should reach out to new customers with this deal.

Sharks in the water

Nice offer Ross. In return, we will offer anyone moving to Elevated X from ANY version of MAS free CMS installation PLUS 3 months free on your CMS license.

For anyone who purchases the latest version MAS v2 and is unhappy with it, we will migrate all of your content and data to Elevated X for free.

Elevated X has no setup fee. We provide free installation and setup.

I look forward to competing with Mansion and MAS in 2013 and beyond! :thumbsup

AJ

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ross the Boss
we will waive any license fee for anyone moving from ElevatedX to MAS V2

AJ, excellent! This will benefit program owners a lot going forward, and we are right there with you on that deal. May the best product win :)

Not only shall we waive the license fee for our rent version of MAS V2 for anyone moving from ElevatedX - we will also throw in a the same 3 months for free AND we will take care of setting the import /including the custom parts, content, templates etc. for the first site - that is normally worth between $750-$1500 of work.

We have come to realize that a lot of companies are not aware of the fact that Mansion Productions? MAS CMS department has it?s own Webmaster Department for all the ?grind work? that is always needed when setting up a CMS to function properly. We are not a ?one man shop?, but we have a good crew of people dealing with support and webmaster services on a daily basis for our clients. Dess, head of our webmaster department will pitch in here with services offered on top of just providing the software.

Be sure to contact myself, Dess, KR, Jorge, Oy, Garry or any of the other ones in Mansion to find out more about how this will work out for you.

Competition is a good thing AJ, and I am glad that we have agreed to finally compete on an even keel after all these years. Best of luck!

Ross

This right here is fucking HUGE! Anyone who's worked with ElevatedX template system can agree hands down. This is a real game changer right there top notch BROmance! This is A+++ raising the stakes to next level of support on the challenge.... hanging your balls out there to grab additional market share. Bravo fine sire.

:thumbsup

I've worked with ElevatedX, MAS, and CARMA. When I used CARMA 4 or 5 years ago, CARMA just did not even compare... which surprised me as it was our first choice given the quality of NATS. Perhaps CARMA has improved since then, not sure. But at the time, MAS blew CARMA away -- and if anyone has ever worked with Dess, then you know she goes way above and beyond for you. I've yet to meet anyone in the past 15 years who offered that kind of support as she did. That said, I quite liked ElevatedX and think it's a rock solid product.

Both MAS and ElevatedX have their quirks, and their own way of doing things that can drive you crazy at times. But both are really very functional once you understand the templating systems on both. At that point, your only real obstacle is your own creativity as both can do all of the usual stuff for a paysite and tour.

Sweet deal ...

We all completely agree that both Mas and Elevated are solid products and that competition is the key of the progress.

And thanks for the nice words Rob.
For me personally, giving the best support has always been top priority - days and nights, weekends and holidays. There has never been a case when client contacts me with a question, even though it is not related to templates, and not getting help.

Over the years our webmaster department had integrated hundreds of sites for our clients, helped others with advices on improving their site structure or implement custom stuff.

MAS is very flexible and easy to work with, but many clients prefer to concentrate on producing content rather than doing all the work on maintaining a website themselves.

So all they do is upload their content, and our webmasters take care of the rest

To sweeten the honey pot, anybody who leaves ElevatedX OR MAS, I will take a picture of myself putting my nuts on your face with the infamous PBBC Penis Bird perched upon my my erect penis.

That's a solid offer. Where the hell were you earlier when I needed a solid counter-offer? I wish I had thought of it first but I like your idea so much I'm going to steal it.

I'm retracting my earlier offer. Elevated X is no longer offering any discount to people who switch to us from MAS. Instead we are offering a picture of this guy putting his nuts on your face with the infamous PBBC Penis Bird perched upon his erect penis. :thumbsup

AJ

You're a good man. :thumbsup

It sure was a solid offer :1orglaugh

Our offer still stand though :thumbsup

CARMA is horrible, nothing in it makes any sense and everything is very time consuming. It's very clear that nothing has been really thought trough when writing that software.

Elevated-X is a lot better, but it's very hard to customize things. Skinning is quite easy, but if you want a lot of custom stuff it's a bitch to work with the templates.

If you have the money and just need specific features the best is to go custom. There is so much stuff in these things that most people won't need which makes things overly complicated.

All that most members areas need these days is a tube-style layout with a JW player.

You also need a cms that will render all the different formats you want to use. It saves a lot of time, And time is money :2 cents:

It's 2013, all you need is mp4

Which kind of doesn't make sense for me since NATS turned out pretty good. It's weird how one product from the same company turns out great and another not so much.



Agreed. ElevX is pretty good out of the box, but it's a shame the company won't accept any customization request. I mean, if the customer is paying money for it, why not put those coders to work since it's their full time job anyway.


Another issues with all these CM scripts is that there is almost no design/template/integration support. Zuzanna is the only designer that I know of who can handle ElevatedX, but her prices are outrageous. It would be good if these companies kept a full time designer on their staff who could do the complete integration for a client. I bet this would bring much more business.

I'd love to try out some of these other scripts, like MAS for example, but I wouldn't even go near it because there are no people who could be hired to do the turn-key config (design, templates etc.).

I hope you're being sarcastic.

Hi Lichen - check out reply # 26 from Dess who works for MAS: https://gfy.com/showpost.php?p=19499926&postcount=26 - We do the turn-key config 100% at Mansion Productions :2 cents:

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Sounds good.

This will improve. We're redeveloping the Elevated X template system from the ground up to make the system easy for anyone to customize.

Shoot me an email to [email protected], I wouldn't mind having your input if you would like to be part of a small tesr group that gives feedback on this.

AJ