Are the sponsors shaving? Is that myth or fact?
 

Don't have info about NATS but ccbill has an option to shave rebills.You've got to keep your eyes open :party-smi

all i can say is: see sig! :glugglug

Proof ???

ccbill have such option?

It's a fact.

http://image22.webshots.com/22/8/25/...8nLYfes_fs.jpg

http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI...ock_64-298.jpg

not likely just tubes killing...

interesting

Wosh.....let me grab some popcorn, this could be nice!

Ruh roh...

Did you miss the apple twins threads? People were not getting paid for initials but getting paid for the rebills 0 joins but getting rebills :1orglaugh

At least that is what people were claiming. I never promoted them.

I didn't see that. I guess any program could change the program rules, anytime they like. Like any standalone backend, could break postbacks and never rebuild the stats for Webmasters.

actually, they are pulling the ccbill signup option but said people would continue to get active rebills. Not so great, but nothing to do with "shaving"...

Actually thats not what Im talking about :winkwink:

It's CO2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

there is no spoon....

I vote this the oldest question on adult boards!

Until affiliates get sponsor access on backends, this question will continue to come up over and over and over and over again....

im glancing through the referenced threads to find out what your referring to but let me say now your claim that our system has an option to shave rebills is pretty outrageous

What he said.

However, I would say that anytime you have a third-party(ccbill) handling all billing, initial signups, rebills and payouts, the odds of shaving are significantly less than when a program is running it's own billing, rebills and payouts(NATS).

I run on ccbill, so take that into consideration. But, I try to be objective in my thinking.

what he said

i must have missed the apple twins drama

Frankly, there is no way to know and no way to legally acquire proof as to whether they are shaving or not.

CCBill and all the other companies are private therefore not subject to any kind of reporting. Bottom line is that you'll have to take their word for it.

more than one time a sponsor has been caught shaving PIB comes to mind. Do a search for that if you're curious

a program owner can manipulate ANY program (nats/mpa3/ccbill/idev/jrox) to not payout on certain sales. Period.

there are many ways to do it, they have been posted on here before, this is nothing new

now as far as a shaving *feature*, that was mpa3 and done out with 5 years ago

I own several affiliate sites that generate sales for many sponsors. I also own my own paysite affiliate program that uses NATS for statistical tracking with direct payouts from CCBill as a hybrid of the best of both systems.

It would take a program owner MORE time and energy to shave a sale from you than it would take them to generate enough traffic to earn an additional sale. Why would any program owner take hours of their time to try and shave a few sales when they can put the same amount of time and energy into earning 10x the number of sales that you will ever send them instead?

When you consider the possibility of sponsors shaving there is only ONE important fact that you should always keep in mind: Nobody cares how many sales you get from a sponsor. The only thing that matters is total number of dollars they pay you divided by total number of uniques you send them.

Total Dollars Paid Divided By Total Uniques Sent

If you send a sponsor 1000 uniques and they pay you $100.00 that sponsor is paying you 10 cents per unique. If you also send 1000 uniques to another sponsor and they pay you $20.00 the other sponsor is paying you only 2 cents per unique. Whether one or both or neither are shaving you DOESNT matter at all. The only thing that matters is how much each is paying you per unique.

Send your traffic to the programs that pay you the most money without scamming or screwing your traffic. If a sponsor pays you $1 per unique and shaves 50% of your sales you are still earning $1 per unique. If a program pays you 20 cents per unique and shaves 0% of your sales you are earning 20 cents per unique. The only thing that matters is how much they pay you per unique.

If you think about it, the only shaving that makes sense is REVERSE shaving where a sponsor might pay you MORE for your traffic than you actually earned by adding sales. If a sponsor adds a few sales to your first 10K uniques you are way more likely to send them another 100K uniques even if the ratios aren't very good because you aren't tracking with enough detail.

I hope that answers your question. Shaving does not affect how much money per unique a sponsor is paying you, and since that is the only relevant monetization data when deciding who to send your traffic to... it becomes moot.

Think....

[QUOTE=Relentless;16067059
It would take a program owner MORE time and energy to shave a sale from you than it would take them to generate enough traffic to earn an additional sale. [/QUOTE]


You sir are full of shit and wrong!!!!

plus time to set it up so you dont get caught

Idiot. Read the post.

If sponsor A pays you $1 per unique
and sponsor B pays you 2 cents per unique

Which sponsor is paying you more for your traffic?


Since you can always see how many uniques you sent from your own stats which you know are accurate, and you can always see the amount of money any sponsor actually paid you from you own bank account information, you always have a PERFECT way to know exactly how much money a sponsor paid you per unique.



If you know who paid you the most for your traffic... and you know which sponsors are not scamming your surfers or screwing them with tricks... then you know exactly who to send your traffic to and who to avoid.

It really is that simple.

If the answer was "Yes, sponsors are shaving", or "No, sponsors are not shaving"...

How does either answer affect you? What are you going to do differently now?

can anyone find the PIB thread? I looked and I give up!

Its old from some years back

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...hreadid=299063

GFY search didn't find it - had to use Google to find the thread

http://www.google.com/search?q=pibca...ient=firefox-a

GFY is full of fucking idiots.

A sponsor who shaves your sales is lowering the amount of money that they pay you per unique. Sponsors who pay less per unique get less traffic sent to them than sponsors who pay more per unique.

The *only* way you would ever send traffic to a sponsor who has shaved sales from you is if that sponsor is paying you *so much more* than every other sponsor that even *after shaving sales from you* their payout to you per unique is STILL higher than their competitors....

Think...

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...hlight=pibcash

better thread about PIB Cash - there was a couple others that got caught but I can't remember

I think what they are talking about is this..

In the affiliate admin area go to "tools" than view program details you'll see something like this:

Recurring Subscriptions: Payments for Rebills End After: (Unlimited) rebills

I have never seen a ccbill sponsor have it set for anything but "(Unlimited) rebills"

I don't even know if a sponsor has the option to set it as anything else.

But it can't really be called shaving because the affiliates can see it.

LOL yeah. Since probably 1997 or earlier. I remember when NATS first came out
some people claimed it would prevent shaving, until I demonstrated that it takes
a decent programmer about ten minutes to add shaving to NATS just like any other
system.

To answer the question - yes, they are shaving like mad.
That's one reason, but not the biggest reason, you need to do like
Relentless said and compare the income you get from various programs.
If you do a comparison, you might find that one program earns you
twice as much as another program. You can't tell whether the poorly
performing program is sucks because they are shaving, or because
their tour doesn't sell, or because they have traffic leaks or whatever,
but you can easily tell that they send you less money, so you shouldn't
use them. It really doesn't matter WHY your checks are lower with one
program or another - whether it's shaving or something innocent. What
really matters in the end is which program makes you the most money.

Holy shit. Someone else understands!

Thanks for restoring my faith in GFY raymor :pimp

It's called phasing out the affiliate business model. It is happening right before your eyes.

Relentless and raymor hit the nail on the head.

When I used to run tons of free sites, I'd actually break revenue down to "earnings per page view". The worst sponsors were dropped, and the best pushed harder. It's not rocket science...

Welcome aboard!~:thumbsup

Err, I agree with you 100%. I was mocking the original poster.

I'm astounded at the lack of options Sponsors provide affiliates for tracking... and I've yet to see one API from any sponsor allowing me to query for things on demand. Tracking pixels are standard in just about ever other online market... at the very least.

And WTF is up with CCBill? Did they design their system in 1994 and forget to update it?
They have one of the worst UIs I've ever seen... It's slow, bulky, poorly laid out, and generally a piece of crap.

The adult industry has a LOT to learn about doing business online in 2009...

So was I :thumbsup

Sponsors maybe "stole" some money from you but what would you do if you wouldn't use any sponsors? :helpme

Mainstream programs don't have 500 banners, a 1000+ hosted galleries with daily/weekly updates, tons and tons of pre-made tools, landing pages, daily free pic/video tools, rss auto updating tools, and you can't request crap from them.

They have 10 email examples, 20 banners with the same crap on it, and maybe a landing page or articles 1000 other Webmasters are using.


This is why you need an api with mainstream programs, so the "Affiliate" can actually do some work.

Adult Affiliates don't deserve anything else....

This is becuase of the massive lack of loyalty from Affiliates to programs. It's so bad, programs should start charging Affiliates to be "allowed" to promote them.

Affiliates will accuse/assume good honest programs are shaving/screwing them, simply because ratios slipped, blaming the site ower - thinking the paysite should correct it. Rather than changing traffic, banners, fresh ideas... they change sponsors.

Or they just add galleries into the rotation of things, or feeds.. and "expect" more.


Adult affiliates want and expect the world... and when it doesn't go how they expect, they point fingers and blame others, that's the only shaving really going on in our business.

people don't make millions by trusting each other

It's totally stupid for any sponsor to shave because not only is against the first rule of business which is business ethics. You will always have webmasters that signup under your program to spend money and that's when your ass will get caught. :2 cents:

I have never been in a Nats backend but I always assumed they had a "pause" button for individual accounts. Something they can use when they suspect fraud, spam etc.

ccbill the rebill option is set to unlimited but there have been sponsors who played with that setting. There are threads on here.

Bottom line is that some sponsors have and do muck with stuff to try and make more money off their affiliates.


Edit: added the word some as I asume most sponsors are too busy putting out a good product to worry about it.