i've got my flamesuit on......
 

what the hell makes sponsors think its acceptable to not display 1st page hits? why do webmasters put up with this?

the purpose of this post isn't to call out individual sponsors.. but i look forward to seeing some screencaps of stats here. :winkwink:

sponsors fall into the following categories for representing traffic:
A) NATS or similar. 1st page raws, 1st page uniques, signups.
B) 1st page unique IPs.
C) 1st page "uniques". Whatever they decide is uniques, anyways. I usually seem to lose about 20% of my traffic here, versus about 1% in NATS raw->unique discrepancy.
D) 2nd page uniques. Useless. Might as well just not let me login, and send checks for random amounts.
E) Join page uniques. You have got to be kidding.

Put a stop to this shit. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to see:
1) 1st page raw. RAW. If I click the link 3 times, that's 3 raws.
2) 1st page uniques. The above, filtered for unique IP. (Proxys pass original IPs.)
3) 2nd page uniques.
4) Trailer views (where applicable)
5) Join page uniques.
6) CC Attempts
7) CC Fails (broken down by AVS reasons)
8) CC Approvals (Signups!)

Let's get the appropriate tools this industry deserves. :2 cents:

that seems reasonable to me would make it a lot harder to fuck us

if i was driving the volume of sales to mainstream clients as we're pushing to sponsors, they'd give me access to their authorize.net merchant account. :2 cents: i'd demand (and happily get) this to audit their tracking.

would shake things up in this industry for sure and i'm all for it

yeah, all that would be real nice. especially the first page views and the cc failures.

xclusive.. you've been in adult longer than i have (judging by your post count :1orglaugh), but i'm coming over after being in mainstream since 97.. whats it gonna take to force this change? we're getting screwed by not getting these stats. i'm a programmer, and we manage a team of coders. it would take little to no effort (comparatively to some of the other shit sponsors pull off) to display this stuff. there has to be good reasons why they're not!

whine suit?

start a program, it is all an illusion :2 cents:

thinking the adult industry should get the same tools the rest of the marketing world gets is whining?

i'm not sure what you mean by saying it's all an illusion. :error

I've actually only been back in adult for the last year and a half. I took a few years off to start a family but I started back in 98 or so and i've seen lots of shady shit go on and there are still people like that in this industry. It's going to be impossible to get things to change for everybody but i'm sure a lot of programs would go for this. I have also done a little programming and mainstream so I know it would only take a few days to get all this done and tweaked. But it's not going to happen:(

Not at all I think it's very legit to ask for these tools to make sure everything is on the up and up.

most programs are full of shit = illusion

seriously start a truly honest one yourself, maybe whistleblowerpornsponsor.com or something.. .

the world isnt black and white, there are honest programs.. find them, don't worry about the rest

i can't accept that.. theres more than a few sponsors that claim they want to be 100% "open" and on the level with their webmasters. i think it's time they put their money where their mouth is on this.

i don't have the resources/time/relationships to successfully launch my own sponsor, and i'm not too arrogant to recognize that. but if someone wanted to handle the content/design side of one, i'd provide the software/infrastructure to make it work. :pimp

a lot of stuff is easier said than done. A lot will tell you one thing and then do another. I would love to see it happen though as there is a lot of money to be made by everybody still:)

if their business models aren't profitable, they should die off. that's capitalism.

shaving/obfuscating stats/"trimming" :1orglaugh .. these aren't options.

what languages do you code? php, perl, c? vb or win apps?

sadly a lot of the models are not profitable and tricks are used and they always will be:( i would rather get paid a smaller pps and be sure things were being run straight up so I got what i earned not more not less.

php.. same language NATS is written in ;)

I have a good php coder, but he is busy can you actually output work or allot a certain amout of hours per week even just a few to start etc.. .

I am often busy mysellf.

alias, i manage a team of programmers.. 3 of which are in our office, and we have others we use on a contract basis as needed. i've always got labor available for the right project.

its how their stats are setup. so far the best stat system i like is traffic cash gold, i am not saying that cause they own all my traffic ;) but i love how they show trailer views, first page, 2nd page, join page. etc

yeah, it's cute.. but there are [large] discrepancies in my tracking system's outs and their 1st page hits. like 20%. even when I wash for unique IPs.

alias did you have something in mind? hit me up at 254342256.

bump for good morning gfy

At Adult Players Club we count first page raws and uniques. None of that 2nd page bullshit. We also track your referral URLs to signups along with the site name and campaign ID.
www.adultplayersclub.com

yep yep.. just started adding you guys to my stuff today. you're the first sponsor to respond so i'm gonna put you on the spot.. :winkwink: whats it going to take for you guys to show the info we're all asking for? (see 1st post)

I will get on it. We will do some talking today and see what we can come up with.

good man. be a pioneer. i've got a few other things that would make my (a lot of us') day.. but one step at a time. :thumbsup

Why don't you write the programming to do so...
I think it will take a new program coming out from the start with this. Problem is no one will pay any attention to them.

What he said. I guess if one starts and gets great feedback/PR for doing it, the others will follow?

I work very closely with Mike (studiocritic)...

Like he mentioned earlier, we have no problems developing the software. Our problems comes that because we are new to adult, we do not have the relationships in place as of yet to get the application out to sponsors to try. We assume that most (all?) sponsors would be hard pressed to change what they've got now to a beta version of our platform. (Note to sponsors - if I am wrong about this, contact me on ICQ and let's discuss.)

The folks who develop NATS could implement the viewing of the additional data in approximately two man-hours of code. That's not even two hours of maximum productivity.

NATS seems to be the most trusted (!) solution on the market, and they have the ability, relationships, and infrastructure to shake it up by rolling out an update such as this.

Another question that seemed to have fallen through the cracks - Why don't sponsors allow affiliates to see the IP and exact time of conversion? There's nothing inherently confidential about that data - in fact - it will help to optimize affiliate marketing.

i think it depends on who you send your traffic too

What does that have to do with asking to see _all_ available (what theoretically should be available) information about the traffic being sent?

All Mike (studiocritic) was pushing for was more transparency from sponsors without compromising their business.

Another person claiming what we can/can't do and how long it will take us.

You have no clue how NATS is built, how our company is run, etc. so please do not assume how long things will take us to do things. We're always improving NATS with what we feel is currently most important. If we felt trailer view counts were most important we would impliment that next.

I appreciate the input and ideas but please do not run around saying we can do something in two hours. NATS is not a bunch of hacked together scripts as most things in this industry are. Things are done differently here for a reason.

As a general note there are always going to be sponsors bullshitting on hit counts & such to fool webmasters since there will always be webmasters who will believe it and will base who they use simply on the ratio shown in stats. Ratios are a horrible way to compare programs to each other as they don't count the same. With custom solutions existing they will never count the same. It's a great idea but unfortunately not a feasable one. This industry will never cooperate on that level as not cooperating makes it easy for one party who doesn't care to one up the next guy.

If you're sending traffic to sponsors you should be counting ad clicks on your end this way you have a level playing field to compare how much you are sending to a specific spsonors. This however is not even perfect as one ad may draw 10x the interest that the next ad does. It comes down to the ratio how much effort/real estate you put in compared to the return you get.

I've been a programmer for years. I understand/assume that NATS is well written. Thus, 2 hours is overshooting the target for such extra transparency and reporting.

And out of all that studiocritic listed, you chose... Trailer Views... of which is the least important by most accounts. However, #5, 6, and 7 are quite helpful.

Again, NATS is the closest to the goal of more transparency, it has the trust and relationships in place to make this industry more honest and trustworthy. You need not be on the defensive as you were not being attacked, but being called out to help the cause of making this industry better.

I am prepared to provide this info to individual webmasters as requested.

It has always been my advice to webmasters to track their own outgoing raw clicks. That is what we do with our traffic. All of our outbound traffic is based on a VPC ( Value per Click). Who ever has the highest VPC gets the most traffic.

:2 cents:

Nothing that you can say or do will force this change. Get over it and get on with life.

I like your name!:)

making the adult industry honest would leave about 8 sponsors online :1orglaugh

Hi wzl,

NATS is written in a very strict manner and is very strictly version controlled. A this big change, which involves changes in member templates, the stats engine and similar things will not be done in 2 hours, thats what breaks stuff.

This kind of thing would be done in a main version release most likely.

While I agree #5, #6, #7 is interesting, there are much more things we can offer to affiliates which are more important to them right now, especially #6 and #7. Also, #5 is already doable, as is #3 and #4, but its only one-at-a-time right now, so you would have to choose one of 3-5 to actually do.

One more thing that totally messes up your whole 2 hour theory is, what do you exactly call a CC attempt, what a CC failure? Is an attempt every single try for each biller in the cascade? Is a failure every single failure for each biller in the cascade? Do we want attempts and failures for non CC transactions? If not, why not? If yes, for which? Also, can we TRACK attempts and FAILURES and even then AVS REASON, or what I would guess makes more sense is failure reason, for each of the over 25 billers we support?
Will billers that can not track failures or failure reasons mess up the value of these stats?

Now, all those questions above need to be answered before we can even START and for many of them each of our clients will have a different oppinion, so they will start asking us to make it possible to turn off some of these settings and not track those that can not track a reason for example, and similar things. Now this again causes discrepencies in our client's stats which people will get confused about and the whole point of this idea went out of the window.

All that the above was ment to show is that nothing always is as easy as it seems.

The more detail, good for us.
The more detail, bad for them.

So, hire a progger, and build it. Think of what you could do here.