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

People are attracted to Elevated X for how good it is right out of the box with no customization. Every time we add something new they can have it instantly. We're updating the product constantly so if someone has a custom site, it means each time we put out something new that they want (up to several times per year) they'll be amidst some kind of coding project or will need to pay someone to work on their sites. This is shitty and it prevents businesses from staying up to date with what's current.

Obviously we do also realize a lot of people want to dig in and really customize their sites...

I could do like some other CMS companies and sell designs and customizations and make a ton of money but we won't. Elevated X's business model is different from companies who make a good part of their revenue from customizing the CMS system they sell. Our core focus is software and support, not custom coding. We do take on a few custom projects per week but we don't do big integration jobs, design work or large scale coding projects in house.

There are several coders who do Elevated X work. Demand is high and most are already booked up or design companies have them on contract. For example, Czarina is booked solid. Mark Tiarra does freelance Elevated X gigs but is busy with overflow work from design studios paying him to integrate designs for Elevated X customers. Wyldesites and Dickmans quote too high for most clients. Zuzana has no shortage of this kind of work so her rates go up. A few others will take small gigs but don't want to deal with cheapskates or throw out lowball quotes for major development jobs.

Instead of staffing to do this work and charge our customers for it we've undertaken a gigantic project that will likely go on through the end of 2013. We are redoing the Elevated X template system entirely from scratch with the goal of making it easy for even a basic user to make changes to their own sites. This will allow an Elevated X customer to hire any designer or coder, even if that person has zero prior experience with Elevated X.

Anyone who would like to give input on the new Elevated X template system is welcome. Please shoot me an email at [email protected] if you want to be a part of the process.

AJ

CMS like Wordpress and b2Evo can do the same as all those payscripts with long learning curve. Anyhow, as long as you don't want to cheat members into believing they are watching new content that in fact is recycled stuff, there is no need to have them imho.
Certainly, the systems are advanced and masterpieces of technology. Just saying a good quality paysite does not need tricks and gimmicks.

No I am not.
There is absolutely no need to offer videos in any other format than h264 mp4

From a technical perspective this is pretty accurate. When it comes to pay site owners and pay site members/customers the same logic doesn't apply.

I'll give you a real example.

We've had automatic video encoding functionality in the Elevated X CMS since 2008. That's 5 full years.

During that time, we saw things go from WMV/MPG/MOV/Flash being the formats people wanted to seeing Flash become the primary format and one of those others become the secondary, to seeing Flash/MP4 being the primary combination.

18 months ago we removed Flash from our product demo site and removed it as a default and went to just MP4. The result was a series of emails from prospective customers and existing customers asking if we supported Flash and other video formats. We realized they weren't ready for it so we then re-encoded all of our videos into better quality Flash files and added the format back into the system defaults.

We later realized if people saw the "Flash player" it didn't matter what video format it was actually playing. They were happy as long as they believed it was playing Flash even though it was playing MP4.

Elevated X is progressive when it comes to tech trends. Our CMS supports a multitude of devices with no customization needed including tablets and mobile phones. We've had detection for HTML5 capable devices and automated delivery of automatically encoded MP4 video in multiple sizes based on devide since 2010.

After all of that, people still want Flash and other formats.

If and when MP4 does become the only file people want to offer, automated video encoding will still be critital because not just 1 file, 1 size or 1 watermark is needed to deliver optimal results to all customers on all devices and platforms. This isn't going to change anytime soon. :2 cents:

Look at how long it took Real Media and Quicktime to drop off the list of what people felt were "required" video formats. Believe it or not we still come across pay site owners with Real Video files on their sites.

I like this thread

Mansion Productions keeps full time designers and full time webmasters whose primary job is to do complete turnkey integrations - from new designs, to redesigns of existing sites running on MAS or another CMS, to full import and setup of all the data from whatever system or even from static HTML hand-made and manually updated sites (yes, even though it's 2013 there are still clients with such sites out there).

I do not quite agree, and for sure it is not true for everyone who just needs specific features. It depends on how different those features are from what a CMS can offer out of the box, and how much money one is willing to spend. Most of the times the requests for so called "customizations" end up with a small piece of additional php code directly in the templates, with zero customization of core program scripts. And if it takes less than a couple of hours to do it, we don't even charge the clients, just do it for them.

And even if the requested features are serious and need coding, it still comes out less expensive to have the CMS vendor add these custom features charging only for them, than to hire someone and pay him for reinventing the wheel - then spend all the time needed to bugfix and troubleshoot basic features that have been a standard in a good tailored adult CMS, tested and perfected for years.

Not necessarily. For the last 3-4 years we are taking only customization request that can be implemented in one of the following ways:

(a) template tweaks or small piece of external code (php and/or javascript) which is either put directly in the templates or included from external files on the client side, so that updates made to the CMS do not break or affect the functioning of these custom add-ons

(b) a new set of tags within the MAS proprietary templating system which can be used on client's demand and do not interfere with the remaining tags

(c) modifications in the core system scripts that either extend the existing functionalities (and are optional to use), or in the rare cases when they conflict with an already established functionality they can be turned on or off through a global configuration switch - so that the new code works well in both cases, does not affect other customers and there is no need to re-do or troubleshoot it when new versions get delivered.

I partially agree with AJ that customizations and new feature development are two different business models and it is easier to move forward if a company focus on just one of them. In the past we had taken on many severe customizations for clients which turned their versions into separate branches that could hardly be updated along with the main one. We have quickly realized that this is not a good practice and chose to go in the middle. Bit by bit we've reintegrated most of the standalone customizations into the standard MAS version, this way making them available to anyone with just a few configuration settings. And now we're doing only customizations that do not require sepaarte versions of the system scripts, as I mentioned above.

Respectively, for features demanded by clients who go into the main version and are really good and useful for others, we are quoting less than 50% of the actual cost of the job, or many times even do it for free if the client is not in position to want it immediately. This business model is helping the system grow with the needs of its customers.

As for the template system - we had realized from the very beginning, before even MAS 1.0 was put live back in 2002, that neither Smarty nor XML are good enough or easy enough for basic users to deal with. So we've developed our own template system which has proven to work well there has never been a need to redo it completely - just to add new tags and control structures to it. And it is now offering both the basic tags, which can be edited by anyone directly in Dreamweaver, in design view, as well as more advanced tags and structures, for the more demanding users who still don't need to be programmers but only have basic HTML code editing skills.


-- Ross

:2 cents: You hit the nail on the head.

"Flash" has become synonymous with streaming like "Xerox" is synonymous with making copies of paper. Most members really don't know the difference between the formats other than some work for them and some do not. As long as they think they are seeing a "Flash" video, or whatever they think it is, they are happy.

We say yes whenever we are asked if we have Flash videos because we know it means they are asking if we have streaming or not.

Agreed.

:thumbsup

Would love to see TMM in the thread with updates on Carma

yes, agreed!

:thumbsup