Shaving Sponsor Tests - Bullshit
 

Ya know so many talk about shaving, fraud stealing and come over here and run off the mouth because they did a test they think tells it all....but none of these tests would hold up in a court of law, and most certainly would be found flawed.

Then if you do a lame test you want to come here and point fingers accusing sponsors of deep shaves....and everyone joins hte wagon and talks about the BS and the need to pull traffic etc based on some smucks nick which means nothing to me.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

The eyes are open and this nick is a hero for revealing a bias study that proves shit, but cannot afford to burn bridges and reveal his suspicions...

BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT.

:glugglug

There's not a single major sponsor out there that would want to go through the discovery process in a court case such as this...they'd more than likely settle if it were a civil issue.

Another thing is if a sponsor is participating in such a matter as shaving RICO comes into effect...these people will lose everything.

In order for it to work properly you'd have to have the CEO, CTO, and possibly the CFO in on it = conspiracy.

Even if it were just the CEO and a few techies = conspiracy.

And once again RICO = loss of everything.

I have a feeling before it's all over with you will have at least one disgruntled employee who will come forward and approach someone in law enforcement and you'll see someone big being taken down.

That's all it takes...one weak link and the whole chain snaps.

Good points.

Question.

If this shaving is so common then why has there been nothing official or well known lawsuits supporting the claim. Every webmaster believes most every sponsor shaves, iis this such a good opinion to believe?

I just hate the "talk" and no real proof, the proof folks worship now is flawed...if somebody hired a random company to do an audit, that takes months and months of data gathering...

Its real simple, if you think you sponsor shaves, quit the program but keep it off the boards unless you can back shit up thats not overly flawed....

I guess it would be more like the reason anyone in any business turns a blind eye to things.

This while a large community is still a very small community. People like to pretend they are independent of each other and don't rely upon each other when in fact we are all VERY DEPENDENT upon each other.

Of course there are exceptions as with any industry.

But if you own a pasyite you depend upon traffic sources *affiliates*, processing *processors*, upsells *other sponsors* etc.

If you are a gallery maker you depend upon traffic *tgps, mgps, se's, link lists*, affiliate programs *sponsors*

We could go on...but I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you are a whistle blower I think it will have some very serious reprecussions going along with that.

Imagine the guy who puts a company like ARS *not claiming the shave* out of business. There will be quite a number of people who will be very pissed they didn't get a check, or lose a good source of income and as we all know people are fond of killing the messenger.

I agree tests are bullshit but there is one fact that many here know and that is that some private accounting systems have a shave feature and auto signup feature built into them.

In the past 12 months I met and spoke to many many programmers, 2 showed me stuff they did for decent size sponsors BOTH had a shave fuction built in!

1 even had a function where they can set an account to get a signup automatically after X amount of hits.

I wont point out the sponsors because there is no proof that they are using it.

Well I dont think ARS or CE or any of the large programs that have been around for a while shave, companies who shave will mostlikly commit other bullshit that will land them out of business within 18 months.

What I do think and know is that there are many newbies every day that dont know shit and start pushing a sponsor and they cant figure out why if their hun gallery got 100,000 hits and they got 0 signups.

Those are the people making problems more then anything

Whether or not those companies shave or not I won't debate, I have my own information regarding some of the larger companies given to me by a very reputable source who has his own way of testing...and I also have my own experiences.

As I said in that post I wasn't saying ARS shaved, but imagine if some webmaster was able to shut a company down who has an affiliate database that is active numbering in the thousands...the effect of that on 1,000-2,000 webmasters would be very damaging for that lone webmaster who blew the whistle.

How long have you been in this business Lee Noga?

Or do you just yap alot and not have any real traffic?

If you had real traffic and were diligent enough to do your own tests, you would know there is a lot of shaving going on.

I settle out of court....

Regardless of what any court says, you don't always need "proof" to know what's going down. Just because you can't prove something doesn't mean it isn't happening.

If it looks like shit, if it smells like shit... it's probably shit. Anyone who says otherwise is just flapping their gums as an outsider.

My thoughts exactly

Shaving is fraud. Period. If I catch one of my sponsors shaving my account with evidences I'll cause them so much bad exposure that no possible advertising budget will cover the damage.

Did anyone notice that every thread on this subject got a new name and creator after 50 posts... This is like 3 in the last 12 hours.

I agree with you Lee .. bringing something like this to the boards does nothing but make the poster look bad.

Thats all well and good lee but we've both been around long enough to know all is not perfect in pornville.
Simply having a look at most of the affiliate software on the market shows some reality.
.... although I agree that many/some claims are made with bullsh*t evidence, turning a blind eye to any and all accounts is also

:2 cents:

Anyone who thinks a large program shave, say 10% and survive long term does not understand running an affiliate model. It is hard enough to convert traffic, with no shave and keep affiliates and their traffic. Shaving and scrubbing are two terms that people throw around that they have no clue about.

EXACTLY!!!

I shave my balls. You should see them, Brad, they're all smooth! Women love it!

please enlighten us

why do you care? is your board not busy enough? strange. seems like there would be plenty of webmasters waiting to be entertained by a bitter, rude, obnoxious underachieving butch lesbian.

Will you be the first to open your books to an independent audit?
:)

Sponsors that shave should be killed.

:BangBang:

I am not here to enlighten or educate. There are some things that can not be substituted for running an affiliate program for 6 years.

I will open my books, right next to FM's!

Me too... much more nut licking that way !

Looking forward to seeing that. :thumbsup

LOL so basically when hell freezes over :)

Sponsors that shave:disgust

Top Bucks, FlashCash, & Porn Kings have beat ya to it. :)
(see http://www.clicktruth.com)


p.s. ClickTruth is currently being re-worked a bit after feedback and suggestions by Choker. But if you run a program and want to get audited, it can begin new audits soon.

Every month hundreds of hosted galleries are taken offline and their URLs redirected. I doubt if I receive notice about more than 1 in 10. Similarly 2-3 sponsors change their processor or for some other reason require new referal codes. Maybe one-quarter notify their affiliates.

If you want to be generous, you could put things like that down to inefficiency and in some cases that is probably true. But in all cases? And how about the type of exit console that was designed not to maximise sales, but specifically to divert surfers away from the site to which they had been sent? They are not as popular now as in the past, but it didn't take them long to appear once the concept of "legitimate" consoles had been developed.

Smoke and mirrors are routinely employed in this business and we don't come close to having professional standards as the norm. Neither in the way we treat customers nor each other. The software "exposed" today isn't anything new: another program with the same facility appeared here earlier this year and that wasn't the first either. It simply defies reason that shaving does not go on: particularly since it can be so easy to do.

This is what you get for sending traffic to fly by night operations. I would stick to the pillars of the industry, and send any left over traffic to yourself. Programs pop up every day, you should be very careful who you do business with. Just like in any other form of business.

Affiliates should come on the board when they feel they are being shaved

I agree...Lee Noga shut up already

Lee Noga..were you the one who suggested that everyone should consult Cohen about whether they should pay a fee for having the word sex in their domain ...when cohen still had sex.com?

Assumptions, assumptions: 30-odd years in different businesses and 7 in this have actually taught me some lessons. In any case, there are very few fly-by-night operations that get around to running affiliate programs and acheive much in the way of a high profile.

As to "pillars of the industry". That's something we can talk about in 5 or 10 years, once we can separate those with the ability to prosper in a maturing market from those only blessed with fortunate timing.

Lee Noga is a mouthpiece for paysites. Is she a webmistress? No fucking way. She's an employee.

I would rather listen to lil2rich4u2 or goddamn spacedog

Will you be my new daddy?

I can tell you that if you'll be in this position most probably you'll do the same.

For the record, I don't see most of the major PPS sponsor to shave sales. Analyze their billing models, exit consoles,email marketing, cross sales and you'll see how it can be done. If you daily battle to maximize your ROI, you'll notice that's happening mostly by using major PPS sponsors rather small programs. Exceptions do exist, but the impression you'll make more money always by using small problems is completely false. Some sponsor cases honestly make me wonder how they manage to convert that well and payout that high.

no but the screenshots of the admin area will :Graucho

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Lee, I usually respect your posts, because you're one of the originals and have been in the biz for a long time like me, but I have to strongly disagree on this post here.

Besides shaving sponsors I've seen over the years, I even caught a card processor, that had deployed an elaborate process to steal revenues from webmasters, because when they fucked over one of their main programmers, who I had become friends with he told me what they were up to, so don't tell me there isn't theft happening in this business. That processor is out of business now, but I can only imagine how much money they successfully ripped from webmasters.

There are so many ways to cheat in this business its scary. Webmasters, traffic brokers, etc. cheat also, and even more so than sponsor programs.

Some small programs have no clue what to do with traffic. Go to a big time programs tour, and you'll see the difference. They know how to squeeze as much money as possible off the tours, and then you can mix in some cute tricks, like "holes in the tour", e-mail boxes, etc - again, this is pretty much expected.

Anyway, 80% of the webmasters in a program can pull the links, and it would be hard to tell the difference. So why even sweat it?

And get reamed? Yeah right. If you "feel" you are being shaved that means you don't have proof positive to back it up.

I think something that a previous poster said is happening with much greater frequency than shaving and that is simply redirecting links and/or accounts just mysteriously disappearing while the sponsor continues to receive traffic from the sites. It's not like they can't check logs to see who rarely checks stats. Even if they only get away with it a week or few before a webmaster catches on multiply that by the number they do it to and the newbies lined up to take their place and that is a lot of free shaved traffic while dealing better on the level with their high volume affiliates who will come to the boards and blast detractors.

Now I have no proof of that^. My experience of logging on from 2 other computers and a WebTV to "check my links" only to have those hits not show in my stats means nothing. Currently I am going through my pages to remove a couple of sponsors who are well advertised around the webmaster boards/resource pages to remove their links because my account logins no longer work. One even sends me my login that doesn't work when I request my password info. Neither responded to e-mail inquiring about my account status.

As far as taking cheaters to court, nobody is going to spend the big bucks it would cost for what is probably a fraction of the amount they could "prove" was taken from them IF they could prove it. THEN, how many courts are going to deal fairly with a porn case anyway?

1995 - Internet

1988 - Adult Industry BBS

1991 - XXX CD-ROM publisher

Earned the right to "yap" if you know what I mean :-)

:drinkup

I will take the value meal #1, no onions, and extra salt.

If you work hard you may become Walmarts next door greeter.

Build your own program and send traffic to yourself = no shaving... :2 cents:

~Ray

Got a party invitation from Cohen myself and my attorneys told hm to go fuck himself. He wanted my attorneys to serve me and he was left with this advice, "Ya want to server her, find her" and he dropped off the face of the earth.

Since you in the "know" many webmaster settled with Cohen and paid the nuisance fee so as not to interupt their business, during those times that was not such a bad idea for many to opt for.

Kinda like the Acacia exit strategy some are chosing now.

Any other questions?

I am an asshole, any other concerns you may have?

PS--

50 signups