Wired magazine article paints harsh picture of industry
 

San Jose Mercury News reporter Chris O'Brien wrote the piece for Wired magazine. He's also working on a book on the sex.com case though that project now appears dead.

This Wired article was a major pain for Chris and I bet he'd be glad to wash his hands of it.

I hear the story has been pushed back another month.

Copies of the proposed Wired cover story have circulated around the industry for about a week now.

XXX says: "The article is not glorifying about Gary. It's slanted to make the industry look bad. It makes almost everyone in the business to be a scumbag. Aly and Kevin are not happy about it. If they print what is in the draft version, Kevin Blatt says he will sue. 'It's [blowjob story from Girly] irrelevant to the story and it is such bulls---.'

"Chris O'Brian really f---ed us good. I'm really shaking my head. This has been going on for about a year and I thought the guy was really cool."

Meanwhile, last week, Gary Kremen and Charles Carreon settled their dispute over Carreon's legal fee for the sex.com battle. Gary and Charles sat in a room for eight hours until they worked everything out and the two men are best of friends again.

http://www.setgo.com/article.html?id...fc30c9212ccddf

Anyone actually going to deny this? Aside from the upper level webmasters, the percentage of cheats, theifs, liars and scammers outnumber the honest. Who is 100% honest to their surfers and other webmasters? Very, very few.

This whole industry is build on silent rebills.

Obviously not because this is convenient for the customer as
stated on the join page.

So yeah.. scumbags.. ALL of you.

Gee, I wonder who XXX is. ;)

And you think this is any different from the IBM's and Microsofts of the world?

yes, MS doesnt charge you silently if you dont upgrade
to the next version.

Who's Kevin Blatt?

How was the bachelor party sugar?

Yeah! Fill us on, Darren. I want all the bachelor party dirt!

Dude, you have no fucking clue.... get out of this biz while you still have some money left

Amen to that!

:thumbsup :thumbsup

on a similar note....

...the US congress passing some of the shit they've been doing lately is like being preached to by a 2 dollar crack-head hooka...


most 'apparently' good institutions that wield a lot of power are at it's core....rotten...it's just how deep into the fine print you have to look to find it....


insurance companies, major media, pharmaceutical giants.....are their morals or biz ethics any better than this industry?


hell no...

Doesn't he make beer? :)




PS: Congrats on the recent nuptuals....

Anyone have it?

Maybe someone over at AVN has a copy?

In this business you either make spam or delete spam. You can pretty well tell who is who by which side of this fence you sit on.

I delete a lot of spam. Hours wasted every day and thousands of dollars spent for spam detection shit I never imagined I'd need when I started.

I'm not talking about email spam here. I'm talking about people who try to scam every fucking way imaginable. And when you kick them off your proggy THEY get belligerent. Jesus fucking Christ, if you're gonna make your money by ripping people off, at least go away quietly when you're caught.

Lensman it's not out yet- and I prefer it doesn't ever come out,

However, gary received the first three pages of the 8 page spread and it's not too glorifying of anything.

It's slanted.

Media will not comment on the scum that "legitimate" business is.

It however has no quams with attacking the adult business, which is by far the most tame of any industry out there.

im not surprised. wired has become a political mouthpeice for right wing technology interests.

conde nast (owners of wired) must be in tight with the administration.

http://www.condenet.com/condenast/

the last street copy of wired was totally pro-war, pro military.

Wired magazine was once only prepared on macs and they refused all cigarette ads.

This magazine has gone to FACKING HELL!

if this makes you mad...dont just blab on a board. do something about it.

Send a letter to the editor.
[email protected]

Wow. I can't believe somebody actually agrees with me on this one.

Right on!

The rebill thing is a good point, but it's true that the big boys do it, too.

I signed up for hotmail premium service. $20 per year, I think. Not much, but how do I unsub? I don't see any obvious unsub on the site. Will they rebill me? I think so. Like Yahoo.

and cable companies, and newspaper subscribers, and everyone else offering per-period billing services.

this is too much... go Nets!

Here come the so-called justifications all over again.

All I can say is that a friend of mine just lost his merchant account because of rebills.

The bank said they were getting too many chargebacks from the rebills. My friend refused to stop the rebills because he was making too much money from it.

The bank jacked up his fees. Then, finally cut him off. He lost the rebills, and everything else.

if you have a good site with good content people are happy you rebill them

If you have a good site with good content, people will be happy to come back. You won't have to rebill them.

Give them the choice. Don't try to force it on them.

Fucking shit like advertising a free trial on a porn site is any different than advertising a cell phone as free. All business do stuff like that, not just porn.

I totally agree

I beg your pardon I don?t fuck anyone, speak for yourself. Customers know how to cancel rebills they do it all the time. Most Gym memberships are rebills, so is my health insurance, so is my WSJ.com membership and my elite fitness.com membership also, my swappernet membership isn?t and I wish it was because resigning up is a pain in the ass. I am friends with a Webmaster who actually is pretty big and he told in the beginning he didn?t have rebills and his members complained. My customers are gold to us, I thank god for them everyday. They know everything that is happening to the site and once when it was down for two days. We kept them posted and when it was back up we gave them 5x the normal updates as our way of saying thanks. When ibill cmi was down last week, we posted what was happening and ibill's phone number if they needed to cancel or had problems as well as our email to reach us. We had another problem where passwords weren?t being written to the server and with cmi down there was nothing we could do. I offered 5 people either you can wait till we are back up or I will refund you your money when cmi is back , 100% said I will wait thank you for letting me know what?s happening. MY wife answers most emails as fast as they come in and the sad thing most write back to us, they say "I can?t believe you wrote me back this has never happened. We are never too busy for a customer. The problem is too many think I work for myself I don?t have to answer to anyone not even the customer and then there is the short timers who dont see this as longterm so they dont care who they fuck. Maybe its because I got in this so much older I understand this a little better without the customer you are nothing.

Yeah, well, we're in the adult biz. It may not be fair, but the card associations are cracking down on us.

Maybe you haven't noticed but the adult processing options are getting fewer by the day.

This industry has a lousy reputation with consumers, the banks and the card associations, and a lot of it is justified.

It doesn't really matter what other industries are doing. They can probably get away with it, but we can't.

I guess everybody will have to lose everything before they figure out they'll have to clean up their act.

You lose processing and you're out of biz. Period.

I agree with you, I was in a site from australia that on the outside stated 700,000 pics and 500.000 videos for 29.95 a month there were maybe 240 pics and no videos. Its fraud and has to be clamped down once and for all.

Tony, I almost always agree with your posts. And I'm sure you treat your customers very well.

All I'm saying is give customers both the recurring and non-recurring option.

If this was the industry standard, I'd be willing to bet we wouldn't be in as much trouble as we are today.

Let's face it, not all webmasters are as diligent as you.

Unfortunately, the bad ones (and there are a lot of them) taint us all.

I'll do you one better than that. I joined a new site run by one of the big boys, because I was considering promoting them.

$29.95 for 5 videos. ONLY 5. No pics or anything else.

It was pathetic.

Tony404, please use some sort of line breaks or paragraphs in your posts, it would make them so much more readable. I've been meaning to say this for awhile now. Thanks :)

Well, I see the discussion has gotten totally off target from the original topic, there's a surprise given the posters.

The article in question has NOTHING to do with rebills at all, as a matter of fact the word rebill was not even mentioned, not even alluded to, not even a part of the article.

And yes, I saw the draft of the article in full last week at Gary's house.

The article was a series of quotes and commentary on events, taken totally out of context from anything that might have actually occurred in order to sensationalize the industry itself. There is nothing that I recall being all that pertinent to anything in the industry besides domain names being in the least bit a focus.

Well said more people mshould be like you


Cindy xx

:thumbsup :thumbsup

I will try, I have the worse sentence stucture in the world. Just ask my wife lol I should have her edit my posts like she does with everything else I write. :)

one more satisfied elitefitness member :)

It's good to know your limits.

I am too old to pretend I do everything well. lol I am a powerful speaker but poor writer go figure .

I don't think the average person out there had a high opinion of porn webmasters to begin with... at best, we're considered no better than pornographers.

Yeah, it's pretty funny when adult webmasters justify their rebills by using examples like ATT, AOL and DirectTV.

Somehow I think the public has a little more trust in those companies, and rightfully so. Those companies usually deliver.

You can't always say that about the porn industry, as the above mentioned examples demonstrate.

Too many webmasters don't deliver and are downright scammers.