Adult website sales still down? Get into skimming, just like the pros do.
 

Porn is still selling HUGE in the States and in Europe. But the skimming and stealing has grown so large that it gives the appearance that sales have dropped. There is no regulation on adult credit card processing and the skimming is at an all time high. Skimming, duplicate mirror sites, webcam theft of sales, if you can think it, it's already being done. The credit card billing system is so corrupt and so unregulated it's the wild wild west of making money hand over fist with nobody looking over anyone's shoulders.

But for that average webmaster, who creates an awesome site, with awesome traffic, but gets 1 or 2 sales every other day.... he just blames it on the 'bad economy' and 'the adult business is bad now' Well, the adult business is BOOMING! And it always will... but if you are not a credit card processor steal sales, or a webcam guru stealing sales, you will never know.

The technology of skimming is so advanced, it's untraceable. Their programs feed you just enough sales to keep your site or affiliate program alive while they steal every possible sale just short of you closing shop.

Porn is a huge multi billion dollar annual industry, making money for those who control the actual cash flow, not the content.

Think again....

It's not possible for credit card processors to steal sales...

Don't quit your dayjob.

You mean supporting Zombaio ?

after all that shit i have seen in the past i do not trust or believe anything in this industry ... but, if companies steal more, you just have to work more, if its still profitable ... simply as that ... :2 cents:

oh this dick is still around ...

:thumbsup

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:thumbsup

Naw, man. Make your own stuff by "borrowing it", sell to others, steal/skim from them. Adult Biz 2014, bra. ;)

Skimming is far from a all time high, its at a all time low, trust me! Google is banning for high skims.

10 years doing adult affiliates i learn this from my own experiences. the ones who really make bigger and easier bucks are service providers, like hosting, ads platform, traffic buy platform, stats software, those groups are highest in the pyramid its quite easy to become a millions just setting up a company and work ur way up recruiting webmasters to pay for u monthly. Then u have contents providers photographers or studios who go shoot contents, they make money too but its the same as when u stop doing u stop making money, so kinda like labour yet much more flexible and scalable. U also have models, they are like professionals with fame and they have their own sites they make a nice living but not so rich still they are not like mainstream, money is not as vast as those in the hollywood. At last u have affiliates, these are parttimes or fulltimes, people who just wanna make a beer money or a full salary out of doing websites and putting ads and growing traffics. Well being affiliates are the hardest in adult industry, u go out find customers, lure them to ur site, and convert them. We face alot of uncertains, search engine fluctuations, sponsors payout delays, website maintainence, networking, content managment, its like we go out dig the hole with our hand or tools in hope of finding golds below then we can sell it and get a nice cut and make our living off that. Affiliates are much more suckers then ones i mention above. And I have been doing this for 10 years. Yes u could make 6 figures, but its tons of time hard work, experiences skills and patience, spend the same time doing entrepreneurship maybe u make millions after several years.

Missed me? :winkwink:

I am an affiliate and an affiliate manager, I have to disagree with some things here.

Affiliate networks, atleast us at Society Invite does not take a huge cut. So to say the networks are the winners is false. The affiliates making 6 figures a year are the winners.

Now, affiliates tend to have the most risk; spending money on campaigns to gather data not knowing if their angle is even profitable. No matter if their campaign turns a profit, the affiliate network and the ad broker stilll makes the same ammount of money as if the affiliate is profitable.

Adult and dating has always been strong and reliable with us. Other niches tend to fluctuate a lot, adult/dating is solid.

Just a couple points because I am short on time / too lazy to do a proper post:

- Affiliates are overall lazy and suckers. You are right. Reading this forum over the last ten years certainly supports this. This does not mean it is entirely deserved or that sponsors are correct to take advantage of the situation.

- I think what some of the shavers miss is how much it destroys the motivation to build revenues for the affiliate. In fact even the suspicion of it being an option for the sponsor destroys the affiliate's motivation. It's very easy, especially in these times, to say "fuck adult! They all shave anyway!" or to say "why should I put any more effort into this when the sponsor will only shave away my increased sales?"

innovate, experiment, think out of the box!

A lot of people "Blame the Man" for their own shortcomings... Others make things happen. I think your beliefs are incorrect.

.

Well, so call it scrubbing or whatever else you want to call it. But when I send 100 visitors, and they do 10 free joins at $5 each. Then I sent 100 more and get 2 on that account something is wrong. Meanwhile I can make a new account on a new ip/using different company data etc and do 10 free joins again on 100 hits.

And the trust never comes back, I used to spend a lot of time promoting one sponsor, then something didn't smell right (for me and others), I'll never spend much time on them again :2 cents:

we'll stick to making our own content with hope that others begin to send quality traffic to a constantly updated site

Holy fuck, what a moron. This is VenusBlogger, right? Any comments on that?

piriod


lol

How do you really know that? Why does the processor always take your client away from your site for processing? You think the client is really coming back to 'your' site, or a mirror site?

If there is a will, there is way. It's all unregulated, sophisticated and untraceable.

I believe there never was a dip in porn sale, just the skimming began to rise, and like the Hollywood film industry, the larger adult production houses went along with then trend of making product, and then showing a loss.

Let's delv into this a moment.

Hypothetically let's say I surf a tour and join abcwebsite.com through xyzbill.com 3'rd party processor and purchase a user/pass.

At some point I will go back to abcwebsite.com to access the members link and my user/ pass will have to be in the htpassword file on abcwebsite.com's domain, otherwise I will not get access, which in turn I would notify abcwebsite.com's owner if I did not get access.

To play into your theory further, say for example 1000 other people do the same and join abcwebsite.com and somehow get redirected to a mirror. Do you think 1000 customers are going to be redirected to a mirror site and not notice what url they are on?

Furthermore out of those 1000 customers at least 10% or more are going to email abcwebsite for something like "I forgot my password" or "please cancel my subscription", etc etc... Then abcwebsite will try to look up their info in the xyzbill admin and notice something is not right.

I hope this helps you see how yes you are correct it is possible BUT not very likely. And yes there are laws on the books to cover this if it did happen. It's called theft.

Hope this helps ease your mind or anyone else s for that matter.

Thanks for this... now i don't have to write the hole story... Every paysite owner who knows his log files, his customer-database and replies/read his customer's emails knows that cc-processors don't steal sales.

What he said.. In ten years and thousands of support requests we never had a username that didn't marry up to the database and financials. Turning the scrub down would be nice though.

Exactly, not to mention your own site testing etc.

I don't think paysites skim/shave, but I know for a fact most ad/cam/dating networks do.

How about processors that issue to the new member an already existing passcode that is already in your ht access file? That way, the processor keeps the sale, and the user gets access to your site under a shared passcode. Security programs like Strongbox will allow up to 3 or 4 multi IP log ins with the same IP address before auto blocking the passcodes.

I'm not a computer wiz, but all I know, in this digital world, if you can think it, it can be done. The programs for skimming are so sophisticated and un detectable we all have no idea how they function.

point 1 - No, You were lazy and that is why you couldn't cut it as an adult webmaster and had to move on. No shame in that, it's not for everyone and is hard work. Just because you couldn't hack it does not mean that everyone is in the same boat. Talk to some people who have always made sales instead, you will get a better read on what the market capabilities are.

point 2 - How would you have any idea about programs or shaving practices? You have repeated ad nauseum that you haven't tried selling adult paysites for years now. So if you never have how does this make you an authority on the subject? feel free to explain that one...

Brother, I'm not sure if you are in this business or not...but if you knew anything about credit cards you would realize that the reason they "take your client away from your site for processing" is because of regulations that keep people's credit card info safe.

No fucking way in hell they are going to let a website process a person's credit card. The hacking and stealing would be through the roof.
No, the ONLY way to process a card is through a bank's website (merchant account).

If you don't mind me asking...do you even own a paysite? Or any site?
I'm not asking to be a jerk, I'm only asking because some of the pronouncements you make on here sound like a person with no real experience yet.

so i guess the adult industry really is bad then? :'(

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Yeah, that was my thought as well. Gotta be him, he's just as stupid.

How about processors that issue to the new sign up member an already existing passcode that was issued the same day and is already in your ht access file? Or some kind of passcode script that translates the password the sign up created, but it goes to another code in the ht access file. That way, the processor keeps the sale, and the user gets access to your site under a shared passcode. Security programs like Strongbox will allow up to 3 or 4 multi IP log ins with the same IP address before auto blocking the passcodes. That is a simple way processors can steal sales right under your nose.

NewOldPlayer....every member I have chooses their own username and password.
And it's a simple matter for me to check the password file.

You are speaking about things that you just aren't familiar with. Trust me on that. There may be a lot of ways to steal...but you're just off-base on this one.

You join my site, you choose your username and password. You payment is processed on the bank (merchant account) secure gateway that is encrypted.

Once the payment is processed the gateway posts back to my password file and adds that username and password to the password file.

It's a simple and secure method. And it's not handled by me or any other pornographer. It's handled by a heavily regulated bank that has the ability to process through Visa and/or MasterCard.

And the rules and regs for that are so fucking onerous that you feel like you're being anally probed constantly...and that's just on my end as a paysite that they investigate you and run bots to check for banned "words" in your descriptions of scenes.

I can only imagine the incredible amount of background checks, regulation, and rules in force in order for a bank to acquire the ability to process credit cards.

I have my own merchant account. But all that means is that a BANK has given me an account to process credit cards throug h them. In the end it's the bank doing the actual processing. Not me.

And it's the same for third party billers. CC Bill doesn't process anything. They have a huge merchant account with special permissions that allows them to basically be a gateway for multiple accounts to process through their bank.

Hope that makes some sense to you. It's kind of a simplistic explanation, but it's already too long for GFY. lol

Adult is about the most regulated online business for credit card processing.

You mean OVER-regulated. :( And the yearly fee that Visa and MasterCard charge just because you are in the adult industry is just pure stealing from merchants.

Your so right!

OK, if that is true, how is that a large processor like Zombaio, that processes Visa and MC can misappropriate funds and keep the public's money while still operating? There is no constant regulation and nobody is looking over their shoulders. No restrictions at all.

Like many online businesses, they are set up and once they are off and running, greed and theft set in because there isn't enough resources to keep an eye on the thousands of processors that have free range on processing and stealing.

They can't write a script to post, then delete, then re assign the user's made up passcode to coincide with an already established password in the ht access file? Of course they can. These script writers are brilliant. The can manipulate anything with code. They have programs that can re write your entire ht access file when you log on to see it. Once a processor has free range access to your ht access file, it's the wild wild west. Anything goes. And there is no way you will ever know. Just stealing a sale, here and a sale there, no big deal, but multiply that by 1000's of websites, and you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars, DAILY, not monthly but DAILY. Imagine a processor that can make an extra $ 500,000 or $ 1,000,000 per month just for using a skimming program. Untraceable and the webmasters will never know they are only losing 1 or 2 sales a day. So much easier to steal a few dollars from thousands of people, then to steal $100,000 from one person.

yeah, i normally get several sales per day, now dry... and gettind dryer.. one way to find out i suppose is to sign up to one of your affilates by using your own credit card.

.... holy shit, you are really this stupid; it's not an act, is it? :Oh crap

they geo pinned you so all sales from where you are will go thru as normal.

I've read many posts about people 'testing' their sign ups and not getting the sale. When the complain to the processor it's always the same.. "must've been an internal error, we will fix it." then they get the credit.

I could be wrong, but can you prove me 100% wrong? I don't think so.

After any length of time, nobody questions anything anymore. People accept and rely on things always being equal, but theft and greed find a way.

It is in processors interest you make money. Perhaps your traffic is less targeted than you believe.

wow this thread is full of win :1orglaugh

Your argument is ludicrous. Processors cannot ''steal sales.''
If a customer's payment source is billed by the processor (your receiving bank actually) the customer will expect to get what he paid for -- if he doesn't he will come screaming to you! (Or your bank.)

Now, it is another story if the processor declines some sales due to scrubbing or other reasons. However, that is a declined sale and not a ''stolen'' sale.

In most cases if your sale is ''lost'' you never had a sale in the first place ...

I didn't say the customer wasn't getting billed, he is getting billed and getting access to your site without you knowing it. Processor bills member, new member gets access and you are left holding the bag. Member's newly created passcodes are linked to codes already in your ht access file. Simple skimming program.

this is why so many people fail. Instead of working, they're busy showing how little they actually know.

Prove me wrong.

You can't because you have been conditioned to trust processors without blinking. The processing business is unregulated. You're going to tell me that if they had a way to take extra money without anybody knowing, they wouldn't?

You really think processors get by on the piddly little 14%, when they can be earning an extra $ 500,000 to $1,000,000 per month by just skimming a sale here, and a sale there without anybody knowing? I'm not saying they are stealing EVERY sale they can, that would kill the cow. But just one sale per day, maybe 2 from larger sites, a small simple little skim that results in millions extra revenue. The banks have no idea, nor the website owner. If it can be done, it's being done. The basic business model is based on "how much money can be extracted from the consumer without destroying the consumer."

Wake up.