stocktrader23

Programs that have been around for years close up shop and claim lack of funds as an excuse to keep everyone's final payments. The worst part is that affiliates eat this shit up.

Look at epassporte, when the Visa cards got shut down everyone started screaming not to pull your money out because they'd go out of business. Uh, after 7 years of charging fees on every transaction you should have plenty of fucking money. The money their customers had sitting there was never their damn money in the first place.

This is repeated over and over. After pulling millions from the industry is that last $xx,xxx $xxx,xxx so important to these people that they keep it and ruin their chances of ever running something else under their own name? And why all the damn apologists?

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woj

many of them kinda run a ponzi scheme, without even knowing it... all works great when the $$ is flowing, but any disruption and they are all fucked...

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signupdamnit

Most affiliates aren't keeping track. They can open another program and many affiliates will eat it right up. Either they pretend to be an employee or they pay someone to be a "part owner" while they stay in the shadows controlling the whole operation.

Not many affiliates are prepared to start posting the names of the scumbags on sites like ripoffreport.com either. So it doesn't hurt their reputation much outside adult. In short we're not making the bastards pay so more think they can get away with it.

Someone fucks you, you need to make them pay.

Agent 488

not much different than most business out there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession

SallyRand

stocktrader23 wrote:

"Are so many programs really running from paycheck to paycheck?"

Sally Rand sez:

"Yes but that is the way of things right now in Adult and on the Internet in general, these days.

Ya just duz whatcha duz'n hopes for the best!"

Ron Bennett

Yep.

Furthermore, mainstream, especially prior to the 2008 crash, is far worse than adult ... many businesses borrow not only to purchase more product (this is understandable and the product itself, most typically, has resale value), but also borrow just to cover their payroll and fixed overhead costs - talk about leveraged!

Getting back to adult ... savvy affiliates know that when payments start getting slow, stats / links get flaky, content updates become sporadic, etc it's time to pull links right away and aggressively getting their funds out before the boom falls. Very often there is advanced warning - one just needs to keep an eye out for warning signs and immediately take corrective action.

Ron

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$5 submissions

Same thing happens in mainstream. Another hot topic is what happens to all the "under minimum payout threshold" funds? For big proggies these add up quickly.

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Ron Bennett

The savvy affiliate will contact the program to close their account, at which point, most affiliate programs (many won't openly disclose this) will, upon request, pay out the under threshold earnings, less reasonable clerical costs (ie. cost of the check, postage, etc), that's remaining in the account at closing.

However, most affiliates don't pursue under threshold earnings out of ignorance, while some purposely don't, for good business reason, as in time is money - is it really worth spending lots of time trying to collect $25 ... for some it's worth the effort, for others, they just figure fuck it and move on.

Ron

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ArsewithClass

Exactly what I was going to say. Most money is placed back into a company. Speculate to accumulate.

Last year, I paid for a new video camera, a wide screen plasma, a shit load of building materials to finish my pool & gloryhole for camshows. A new laptop, a business tour for footage. I could even put washing towels against tax, lol... I dont go that far, but the rest of it was needed for film & camshows for my affiliates to earn from the websites.

A program doesnt just find the material from anywhere, it needs to pay designers, its own advertising & much more.

Konda

In regards to affiliate programs closing shop. In many cases this was caused by two factors. First of all they relied on xsales to be able to do PPS. Visa/Mastercard made stricter rules about xsales and right after that the biggest xsale buyers stopped buying xsales, because of visa/mastercard regulations (and merchant account problems). Most programs did not have the knowledge or correct merchant account setup to successfully facilitate their own xsales + they did not get paid out for their last month(s) of xsales. In addition at exactly the same time Webmasterchecks went down, and most affiliate programs lost hundred thousands of dollars, because they already wired their next affiliate payouts to Webmasterchecks, and then Webmasterchecks got their funds frozen. So if they wanted to do affiliate payouts they needed to do it from their own pockets/reserves.
So basically many programs lost all their buffers in a period of 2/3 weeks, and those with no extra buffers and no ability to process their own xsales were either forced to stop their affiliate programs or sell their programs.

In regards to ePassporte. They probably work like most banks work and only have a small percentage of the actual money in their account. The rest is used for (long term) investments. I think most real banks only have like 10% of all the people's money actually available, the rest is 'in motion'. ePassporte might or might not have invested the money in bad investments (Middle Men?). But just like with any (real) bank, if from one day to another everyone wants to get their money out they have a problem, as the money is simply not there.

Paul Markham

I have a very different view of the business than many. I view it from the angle of them buying content. Not just from me but from others both content stores and custom shooters. This is what I see.

Loads of sponsors have been trimming content budgets for years. Buying less or buying for less. It's across the board as well. From the bottom to the top. How long and how many times do we see content producers in here trying to drum up business?

A top end site was asking if others would like to share the custom shoots of Dean Capture. Sponsors are always looking for cheaper content. Not as good or better, just cheaper. Quality is not important to many. It's about the price.

The image they portray here isn't the image they portray to content providers.

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