Shaving in 2014 - An Inconvenient Truth
 

Some relevant facts about shaving from some dumb ass that has been around for 17 years

A program owner cannot shave from a CCBill sign up page, it is hosted by CCBill and all the tracking is in their hands. If you think a CCBill sale was shaved you are an idiot, if you did a test join that didn't show up, you used the wrong code.
If you think you are being shaved on rev share, you are an idiot, it is pointless, and quite honestly a waste of time for any program owner. By nature, rev share is profitable, business people do not fuck with what is profitable.
If you are not sending more than 5 sales a day to a program, you are not worth shaving. You are too small a fish to make the extra revenue worth the effort.
If you are sending more than 5 sales a day to a program, you are not being shaved, you have achieved a level at which most program owner will talk to you, and work on ways you can increase your business together.
Any program worth shit will be able to tell you straight away what your traffic is doing, sadly for the vast majority here that answer is going to be fuck all.
On a personal note, any program owner that answers a shave accusation on a board with something like what I am adding below, will greatly increase the chance that I want to work with that program.

Dear Piss Ant,
You have sent 4 sales in the past 30 days, 2 have refunded (likely your brother in law you asked to sign up) the other 2 have canceled after the first billing, so after payout, processing fees, normal overhead, etc. I have netted $4.86 from your sales this month.
Kindly fuck off and annoy someone else you whiny cunt
Best Regards
Joe Program Owner

PS, I am pretty sure your brother in law stole all my content for you to use on your tube site, will fuck with you about that in a month or so
:321GFY:321GFY:321GFY:321GFY:321GFY

There was a long thread years ago about shaving and the part I still don't understand is how it matters when you can calculate $ per click.

A) I send 10,000 clicks to program A and earn 22 cents per click

B) I send 10,000 clicks to program B and earn 9 cents per click


Do I care if program A shaved me? No. They paid me the most money per click.

Do I care if program B did not shave me? No. They paid me the least money per click.

If this is a business for you and not a hobby, why does anyone care about anything beyond one simple number: HOW MUCH MONEY THEY PAY YOU PER CLICK

As long as the site is not damaging your brand or treating your customers badly, isn't $ / clicks all that matters?

Can anyone explain that to me? Please?

Good point, yes, ultimately I look at cents per click when making traffic decisions, my best for 2014 is doing 14 cents per click, so if they're already shaving I'm not particularly worried. :2 cents:

Exactly. Affiliate marketing is a reverse auction. Programs compete for your traffic by paying you per click. Whether they call it revshare or PPS or handjobs doesn't matter. You know exactly how many clicks you sent to them and exactly how many dollars they sent back to you. None of that can be messed with or shaved in any way.

If someone wants to pay me $30 per click AFTER shaving 2/3 of my joins... they can have all my traffic.
All that matters is that they pay me more than anyone else and do not mistreat my traffic so it will come back to my sites again in the future. :2 cents:

That's your answer. Too many emotions.

Also, measuring on click is not the top level way to measure. Measure based on resources (time/money/loss time/money spent elsewhere) invested.

Sly I completely agree... but that's a more advanced point of view. The starting point is to measure $ per click. If anyone isn't making decisions based on that, they are an asshat who will never get to your equation for step #2. You are 100% right that not all clicks are the same, and there is value in knowing the resource cost per click on each click you push. :thumbsup

It's about the principle of the thing.

I choose be someone who does the right thing and pay what I owe. And I choose to work exclusively with others who do the same.

Of course I could say "well, I can just hide 10% of these joins and not pay for them" and likely no one would notice and if they did there are plenty of excuses. At the same time I could work for someone like that as well, and probably make a living with my 90%.

But its not like that. There's a mindset in marketing that all the scammers have, and its never pay a dime that you don't absolutely have to. It's like a short in circuitry that destroys all the efficiency of a process. If they owe you 10 and pay you 9, and you are ok with it next week it'll be 8 and finally you'll be lucky to get 1/10th of what you earned. If someone owes me 100 bucks they need to pay me 100 bucks. 0 is the wrong amount to pay and so 10, 50 and so is 99.99

All of you apologists saying "shave me all you want, just make it look like my clicks are valuable and leave me enough to buy more traffic to send you" - I don't know in a way I want to say I hope you get what you deserve, but that supports the people doing it so I don't know. I just hope you realize a thief is a thief, whether he steals a lot or a little, if you keep him around he will eventually take it all because he is not interested in giving value for value, just in taking whatever is not nailed down.

Holy shit, you are an idiot.

What does it matter if the program is PPS or RevShare if a program pockets the sale and affiliate doesn't get credit?

Your whole post is stupid.

I remember back in 1999 collecting email addresses for a company and making 80 cents per confirmed. I was doing about 400$ a day from that. Then one day they sold the company. I went from 400$ a day average to 3 dollars a day. Needless to say, I quit collecting for them.

No it's not. It's math. If 80% of A is bigger than 100% of B.... as long as you are getting 81%+ of A you are always getting more than B will provide.
If B wears a nice hat, has a sexy voice and enjoys county western music - that does not change the size of either number.

NOBODY is saying that....

I'm saying 'Shave me all you want, just make sure you continue to pay me more than anyone else in the world would pay me for the same traffic.'

I can track each click of my own, nobody can falsify that number. I can track each penny I get in actual payments from sponsors, nobody can falsify that number.

Therefore I have 100% complete independent control and certainty about the ONLY two numbers that matter.

Actual money divided by actual clicks = actual value :2 cents:

You may want to rethink your POV.

Let's say you send 1 join a month at 29.99 revshare. You really think a program owner is going to invest ANY time dicking around with shaving your sale to earn $14.00? Now, let's say you send 200 sales a month, you really think a program owner is going to risk losing a whale by paying less $/click than another sponsor would pay for the same traffic on revshare? Seriously... think it through.

I was gonna nit-pick and multi-quote you but the point is:

You assume the alleged "shaving" in whatever hypothetical situation we are discussing is a constant that can be worked around, I am saying it's not. It's watching you and always looking for a way to take whatever you are counting on.

You want to spend hours tweaking and optimizing ROI for a company that is spending hours undermining your earnings have at it, I won't spend too much time trying to dissuade you.

None of that changes the equation one iota.....

Determine a benchmark that is significant to you. As a given let's assume 100K uniques is a significant number to you. Who pays you the most per 100K uniques? Not per day, not per join, not this week or this year. Once you have that benchmark you monitor it. If a sponsor is wasting their time turning shaving on and off all day it has zero impact on how much they pay you per 100K uniques. If that number drops, it doesn't matter if it dropped because they shaved or dropped because the content is stale or dropped because they stopped updating their tour, or anything else. The two numbers that matter are always in your control.

The numbers you control never lie. Money / Clicks = Value.

YOU can shave anything you want.
Who cares about shaving. Send your traffic where it makes the most money.
I will gladly be shaved 50% of sales to a product that converts 1:200 over sending to a product that converts 1:1000

Have a great week alll .. ;)

Who are you shit stain ?

As a program owner I don't even see where shaving makes any sense in this day and age. The only kind of manipulation I have ever done to any affiliates pay is adding sales to get them motivated to send more traffic. There just aren't the sales to go around these days to even make sense of shaving, but everyone's entitled to their views.

You'd be very surprised if you knew his true identify, perhaps you'll find out at some point :2 cents:

The only 'shaving' I've seen, if you want to call it that, is things like programs jacking up the minimum payouts to a few hundred dollars so the little guys cant ever reach them (after already getting a few sales), or flat out 'closing the program' without paying out what they owe. Those dbags deserve all the hate they get.

I found out, still not impressed

There are many things wrong with your post but you have such a bad attitude I'm hesitant to waste my time as all you'll probably do is call me a cunt and a loser a half a dozen times while bragging about your yacht which you claim to have or something like that. But what the hell. I'll try anyway as a matter of sport.

For starters you can shave on CCBILL. It happens all the time. There are many ways.

1. The sponsor can change the PID to another account to where the affiliate is not credited.
2. The sponsor can turn off grouping and use a sub-account where the affiliate is not credited.
3. The sponsor can actually change key variables in the form so that the AID is overridded.
4. The sponsor can use a processor which is not cascaded through CCBILL.
5. Some others but this should be enough for starters?

As for $/click it's a great metric but not the be all and end all. Especially for long term rev share models. With rev share you have a lot of money tied up in future rebills. That means you are relying on the sponsor being around and being honest enough to actually pay you without any funny business. It also depends on the affiliate's methods and how they promo the content. It takes an investment of time and there are other opportunity costs in promoting a sponsor. If the sponsor turns rotten before the affiliate recoups compensation for that investment then the affiliate has lost out. Time is money. Part of the problem for affiliates in the last five years has been having to swap out code and content when a sponsor goes out of business, decides not to pay or otherwise start cheating. The affiliate doesn't get paid for this labor and if they do not change things then they are throwing money away. Smart affiliates will try to minimize this labor and that is the whole point I think. You can minimize needless labor by being able to swap out links and content easily but you can also minimize labor by trying to deal only with reputable and honest sponsors. :) Remember the story of the The Tortoise and the Hare. Longevity matters. You may disagree but it comes down to how we each choose to run our businesses.

So if you had a job in the real word that shaved hours off your paycheck, you wouldn't care as long as you were still making more than other companies pay?

Almost all of the sales I generate, or have generated, are RevShare based. If you are trying to base your $ / click on what you will be paid 3 year from now you are doing it wrong. It has nothing to do with shaving.

Assume I got a Sale from ONE click to each of the following Sponsors
I send a revshare sale to program A.... it rebills for 2 years and they pay me 16 times before shaving the rest of the recurring revenue.

I send a revshare sale to program B.... it rebills for 1 year and they pay me 12 times

I send a revshare sale to program C.... it rebills for 2 years and they pay me 8 times because the honest sponsor who never shaved anyone had a heart-attack and died.

Which sale earned me the most per click? :warning

Actually, I have never claimed to have a yacht, in fact the only claim I have made of ownership on this or any board is a 10 year old piece of shit mini van.

I will give you credit, you have demonstrated that someone can "shave" CCBill, what you have not done is show any compelling reason why they would. Where I have shown many reasons why they wouldn't be bothered.

As for Smart affiliates, they develop relationships with people they want to deal with instead of throwing shit against the wall to 100 different places depending on "rev-share" to every shiny new program that crawls out of the woodwork, then cry when the program is out of business.

As for longevity, I think I have that covered just fine.

You are correct though, I still think you are a cunt, primarily is because all you ever do is whine about what others are doing.

My attitude is just peachy thanks, I just call a cunt a cunt without sugar coating it

Let's say I work for Stock Broker A on a 25% commission. I work 40 hours this week. He is a total scumbag, earns 10K and should pay me $2,500 according to our agreement but he pays me $2,200 and shaves the other $300 off my payout while claiming that was all I was owed.

Now I find out the truth and I'm emotionally angry, so I quit the job and start working for Stock Broker B who agrees to pay double the commission (50%!!!). Stock Broker B is most honest man on Earth. For him I work 46 hours in a week, he makes 2K in sales and pays me $1,000.00 right away

Stock Broker A paid me $2,200/40 = $55.00 per hour

Stock Broker B paid me $1,000/46 = $21.73 per hour

Assuming the work is identical, the commute is identical... everything else is identical....
If you would prefer to work for Stock Broker B you do not understand how math works

The above is a specially designed example you crafted to show your point. I could come up with an example to show the opposite. It means little. In the real world if someone would cheat you once they will probably cheat you more in the future. It comes down to psychology. For many affiliates doing revshare it's a long term business relationship which can last several years or even decades.

Like I said we all have different models we use and we each have our own way of doing things. Personally I prefer doing things which I think realistically will still be making me money 2-3 years out. I tend to shoot for the long term. This minimizes my wasted labor so I don't continually have to chase my tail and get nowhere. But I understand that others have different models. I know for instance blackhats who have a model of putting up 1000 videos a day on tube sites. The videos only last a day or two but that is their model and they profit from it. The same for people who do ad buys and rely on a PPS model. But that isn't what everyone is going for.

His point was that sponsor can earn from revshare more and can earn from revshare less than from PPS.

Sale a: PPS 30$, cleint rebills for 3 months. Profit for sponsor 30$
Sale b: Revshare, client rebills for 3 months. Profit for sponsor 45$

Or any other variations - some sales would be more profitable on pps, some sales more profitable on rev. Depending on how long the client rebills.

So why would they only shave PPS and revshare is strictly NO NO?

BOTH PPS and REV could be shaved or not shaved the same way.

I agree ANYTHING can be shaved. PPS, Revshare... anything. I never said something 'can't' be shaved.
I said if you are smart you focus on $/click and whether someone shaves or not becomes 100% irrelevant.

You make it sound as if there is any real effort needed on an affiliate by affiliate basis. When MPA 2 or whatever it was called, was outed as having built in shave tools, it was a very simple set up requiring a couple of clicks and settings. You really think if a program wants to shave it's done by hand vs being automated?

Again, you are missing the point.

If someone will cheat you once, they may cheat you again. So what. As long as each time they cheat you they continue to pay you more than anyone else.... that is what matters.

If someone figures out an ethical way to earn 10 Billion dollars per click and wants to pay me $30 per click after agreeing to 50/50 revshare.... good for them! I'm happy for them to earn 9+ Billion dollars per click. I'm eager to be shaved. Just keep paying me $30 per click and I will send you all my traffic.... until you stop, or someone else pays $31 per click, or you do something that harms my traffic. :2 cents:

This is understandable, but some people just like to do honest business as "per agreement". If agreement is to pay for every sale then it is natural that people do not like when they are not being paid. Despite the fact that that certain business relationship nets the most money.
It is more than just money, matter of principle and honesty and keeping your word is in play as well.

No. I make it sound like it is 100% irrelevant as long as it does not cause their payment per click to become lower than a competitor, or so low that it becomes worthwhile for me to become a competitor. :2 cents:

hob·by [hob-ee]
noun, plural hob·bies.
1. an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hobby

The bottom line can't change and it's something like effort in and reward out. Take any amount of time and effort and the resulting money and apply teh maths.

Well I'll give you credit in that you at least acknowledged that I showed you can shave with CCBILL. Why would they? Because they can, OldJeff. Most webmasters don't know how to check this stuff. When caught all they have to do is claim ignorance and usually nothing happens. These days there are less affiliates out there to catch them. It's pretty easy to get away with it with less eyes watching and few people knowledgeable enough to know what to look for. Even you seemed not to be aware of these things based on your first post.

Another thing about your first post which I take issue with is that you claim it doesn't make sense to shave the small time players. I think you are missing that shaving many small players can add up to big amounts. Also the lack of volume makes it harder for the small time player to detect anything suspicious based on numbers alone. The small time player would have to do a test signup otherwise the sponsor will claim "that's not enough sales or clicks". There is more risk in shaving a bigger player because they make you a larger percentage of your revenues. With the smaller player the consequences of losing their business alone is far less than losing a whale affiliate.

No it doesn't.

1 sale at 14.95 on 10 clicks = 1.495 per click
1 sale at 14.95 on 10 clicks with 3 sales shaved = 1.495 per click

10 sales at 14.95 on 100 clicks with 6 sales shaved = 1.495 per click
10 sales at 14.95 on 100 clicks with 6 sales shaved = 1.495 per click


The math is super-easy regardless of volume :winkwink:

Mathematically sample size is significant and relates to things such as margin of error. A webmaster sending 1,000 clicks a month to 300 different sponsors has to wait 10 months before they have a sample size of 10,000 clicks to judge a specific sponsor. As you probably know the higher the sample size the greater the certainty of the significance of the metric. In this case the affiliate is putting up links "blind" for almost a year before they have meaningful numbers to analyze. In addition with such volume it may take a long time for them to reach the minimum. When they reach that minimum in 1.5 years will the sponsor still be around to pay them? That $/click value means nothing if you never actually get the money! This isn't the current model I rely on but in the past I did something like this and I can understand it. You ought to be able to see that there is the matter of trust for this type of affiliate...

Now we are discussing business finally!!

Asking several webmasters what they are earning per click from a sponsor is smart.
Asking how long their rebills tend to retain is smart.
Asking which kinds of traffic perform best with sponsor or if your specific kind is likely to do well is smart.
Asking if payments always come on time is smart.

Asking them if they 'feel like' they were shaved is a useless distraction.

I'd really prefer it if you would answer my question directly.

If you had a job in the real word that shaved hours off your paycheck, you wouldn't care as long as you were still making more than other companies pay?

I fully understand your mindset in bending over and taking it if there are no options for equal pay, but you can't just write this stuff off entirely or they will take more and more.

These days, if you have an affiliate sending signups - especially signups that rebill - then a program would be crazy to do anything that would discourage that affiliate from continuing to send you profitable traffic.

Obviously,I can't know what other programs are doing but if you are sending me joins and they are profitable, I'm spending my time working with you to make even more from that traffic.

So if you make a business deal in real word and you get fucked (but still make the most money) you should not have any issue with that?
Like have a dinner with your partner and be like "hey its all cool you stole a bit of money, I still make the most with you" ?

I did answer your question directly. Scroll up and Read my reply again.[/quote]


There are always options for equal or better pay, unless the pay is very good.

Lets use a simple example....

I write reviews on one of my review sites about a terrific site featuring Polish Midgets in Ninja Costumes. The site pays me 26 cents per click for the traffic my review sends to it. I also send traffic to another site about Midgets and it sends me 8 cents per click with the same source. Then I send traffic to a site about girls dressed like Ninja and I get 9 cents per click.

I push more traffic to the Polish Midgets in Ninja Costumes site by featuring it and the sales stay about the same for a while. Then I notice they dropped a bit over the most recent 100K uniques. I do not care if they dropped due to shaving, slow updates, weak content, piracy, oversaturation or any other factor. What I care about is the fact that the site is now paying me only 4 cents per click. So I push more to the other Midget and Ninja sites. I find out they have the same 8 cent and 9 cent payouts as before.

Here are my options:

1 - Keep sending traffic to Polish Midgets in Ninja Costumes at 4 cents a click

2 - Waste a day investigating why it is 4 cents a click

3 - Accept the other site's offer of 9 cents a click as the new high value and feature it instead.

4 - Invest serious time and money to determine exactly what happened so that I can decide if I want to open my own new Polish Midgets in Ninja Costumes, or see if a site about Polish Midgets in Knight and Princess Costumes would be even more profitable (with the Game of Thrones tie-ins that make some sense).

At no point in any of the above does 'did I get shaved' matter at all. :2 cents:

You are welcome to steal $10.00 out of my pocket and replace it with $100.00 any time you want. In fact, I encourage you to do it very often. Yes, you shaved $10.00 off my worth, but you added $90.00 to it.

On the other hand, if you take $10.00 out of my pocket and give me $100.00 but someone else is willing to steal $20.00 from me and give me $1,000.00 I will put all my time into standing closer to them so that they can reach my pocket.

The moment you take $10 and put $9.99 or less back in my pocket... we have a problem.

Dude, stop lifting my CS emails to affiliates

Christ, elementary school lets out early

Based on Thread Views many lurkers find this topic entertaining. I strongly suggest you contact www.EngineFood.com for any of your SEO Text needs. Engaging text about your porn niche, mainstream business interests or any other topic is just as fast and easy for me to generate as threads about the ridiculousness of shaving accusations :pimp

Sometimes I'm just baffled by the mindsets for what's acceptable in this industry. If a company shaves your sales that's wrong. Plan and simple. I don't care if you *still* make more money per-click or whatever with them than another program, they are still essentially stealing from you, as per the original agreement/contract.

As Matt26 said (and it pains me to agree with a holocause-denying conspiracy troll), if a company is paying me $40/hour, but they dock 5 hours off my weekly total, that is fucked up and completely dishonest even if my paycheck still exceeds a $20/hour job.

Beyond being an indicator of future dishonesty, accepting it as a matter of course also *normalizes* such behavior. It breaks the contract - which in various forms is the figurative cornerstone of any business environment - and results in a breakdown of trust and paves the way for future contracts to be broken. I'd argue that latter dynamic was and is a challenge for this industry.

That being said, I've never complained about shaving myself and I do think it's mostly used as a scapegoat these days for affiliates frustrated at the declining value of their traffic and the overall decline in conversions, traffic aside. I had one affiliate a couple years ago imply to me that I was shaving, which was comical - he'd gone from maybe 2 sales a week to 1 sale a month, it was just so far off my radar as to be ludicrous.

But even if it's more myth than reality these days, that doesn't make some of the rationalizations I'm hearing healthy for our industry.

I agree 100%. For that reason, if 2 programs were paying me the exact same amount with one shaving and the other not shaving, I'd send my traffic to the one who does not shave. However, since investigating it all would cost me money and two programs almost never pay an identical amount per click... it becomes moot.

Incidentally, I have a paysite network and affiliate program. I've never shaved a single click from anyone. I don't think it's ethical to do it... I don't think it's profitable to do it... and that's a lot of why I don't anyone is doing it. However, even if someone was.... $/click protects affiliates no matter what else happens as long as the checks come on time.

Not sure how that is comical. I don't find libel or slander funny.

this thread is hilarious, and yea i think the main takeaway here is that ya shaving is bad (durrrr), but at the end of the day as an affiliate you should be worried about what's paying you the best / converting, not wasting time coming up with shave theories and shit

"To Shave Or Not To Shave, that is the question..."

http://imgur.com/2lJeDXZ.jpg