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Originally Posted by CDSmith
I'm actually surprised it took 29 posts before someone said something along this line.
ARS was a terrific sponsor back in the day. Then one day they decided to just wipe out all of their adult pay sites in one fell swoop and go with products, pills maybe, and what looked to be mostly mainstream stuff.
It instantly became one of those programs that I was glad I didn't put more work into promoting them more. I very easily could have put up hundreds of pages and galleries, thousands of links etc, and then would have had to take it all down. I wonder sometimes if program owners fully realize just how much that tends to piss off affiliates.
However, ARS is an industry staple, and one of those programs that you just know without question that you will be paid and your traffic and signups counted fairly. If I were to offer only one piece of advice here it would be to at least address what you guys did several years ago and attempt to reassure people that it won't ever happen again.
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Thanks for your kind words and advice. ARS certainly has created a mold for today's adult affiliate program and it's nice to know that some of you still remember this
It always seems that someone has to bring up something that happened over four years ago. Something that I've had to talk about so much it's now like beating a dead horse. But, I will do what I can to explain and hopefully lay this to rest once and for all.
For those of you that don't remember, 2002-2003 is the time when the credit card companies were cracking down on adult merchants and chargebacks. They were making limits that were unachievable and threatening to add merchants to their terminated merchant file (TMF). Well with the volume that we were doing back then (over 3000 signups every day) we had one of the biggest bullseyes in regards to the TMF. There was a very real threat of being shut down.
With that going on, you have to really take a close look at everything you are doing to prevent disaster. While doing this, we discovered that on top of too many chargebacks, the member values on the sites were just not high enough to even cover commissions. Imagine the profit loss when you are losing money on every one of the 3000+ signups you were doing every day.
So we were left with few options. We could have cashed in our chips and walked away from the table for good. No one wanted to do that, so we had to come up with another plan to try to prevent any further loss and to prevent a TMF. Marc De decided to end the relationship with our paysite provider at the time and send the traffic to a new product to continue to pay webmasters for the traffic that was coming in.
Well hindsight is a bitch as the saying goes, and it turns out that we put our faith in a product that didn't produce and the shit hit the fan. Everyone knows about this. It wasn't easy for anyone, myself included. I nearly left the industry for good after that. I'm sure no one cares about that, so let me tell you what has been done since then.
I have spent a lot of time working on member values, building up a content database and good looking, easy to use members areas. I needed to make sure that the product being sold was as good as it could be. In that regard, I have achieved success. I've boosted trial to full membership conversions into the 35-45% range. This has increased member values and ensures profitability on all signups coming in the door. In other words, I've built a very solid foundation that will support anything that is built on it without risk of what we faced years ago.
Being in complete control of the paysites and the members areas was an absolute necessity if ARS was ever going to be any good, which I now have. The next natural step was to buy ARS from Marc De, which I did in June 2006. In that time, we've been planning new tour styles, new payout structures, a new ARS design, and other things to help us regain our foothold in the industry.
It starts with today's release of the new ARS design and the celebration of the $75 day anniversary, which of course ARS started back in 1999. We've also increased BYOT payouts, so there is no longer a $5 deduction for sending your traffic to those. And yes, ARS was the first to offer a BYOT program as well. We've always been about raising the bar, and we are doing so again.
If anyone would like to discuss anything with me in private, I'm always available. But, everyone needs to understand that ARS is solid and there is no risk in sending your traffic to our paysites. We will do what it takes to earn back your business.