What's the most unethical business practice?
 

Through the years, the adult internet has come up with quite a few "outside the box" methods of generating sales. Almost everyone was used at least one of these on this list to some extent. I'm not here to judge or throw stones, I just wonder what webmasters find most egregious.

I went with a multiple choice on this one...

looks like you forgot to do something :arcadefre

Cross sales should be up there.

mine would be promising me something on the tour that isnt in the members area....something similar to this thread ;)

Look now...

its a "fuck you before you fuck me" attitude that has ruined this business..

its comical, big oil has figured out how to price fix to become the most profitable industry in the corporate world, yet most adult companies would rather spend their time trying to fuck each other over instead of trying to figure out how to work together to maximize profits...

It's there now...for some reason the thread posts before the poll...GFY Mods...if you are reading this!!!!!!!!!!!!

the most unethical business practice in this industry ever was just dinging up credit cards with fake charges - it can't get lower than that. See Crescent Publishing Gambino Family BabeNet et al. That was the lowest it goes. After that was X-Pics and holding credit cards hostage and dinging up more bogus credit card charges.

Prechecked xsales

Yeah...I remember that one, I thought it was the worst too. That one is so old-school I didn't even bother putting it on the list, because nobody has been that brazen since.

Xsales are part of any internet business. Book a trip on expedia or buy something from Amazon.com, they are quite aggressive these day.

Prechecked, no.

Aggressive, yes.

On some adult sites I've seen them prechecked and in very small print.

after Crescent and XPics in the Hall of Shame comes Jon Atherton - his spam and scam operation was insane - the Jenna Jameson Triple whatever he called it - I had no pity for all the crybaby affiliates he stiffed for millions because they were doing the same thing Brazzers and others are doing with the Tube sites - aiding and abetting and profiting from a crime.

Voted for all of them, just for a sake of free right to vote.

pre-crossed x-sales - the straight forward ones i have no issue with - they're not much different than recurring billing - we know that a big % of revenue in this industry comes from recurring charges the customers forget about.

it's the ones that go a step further and have these Lifetime memberships to a site that has no domain name/URL - basically the type of join page Shap was on here crying about 6 months ago.

Voted...

Unethical Business practices: I wouldnt have pop ups in there.


There is two groups you need to break those choices down into, the fuck me group and the doesn't fuck me group. I am only concerned with what other people do that fucks me. If you want to spam, then you are not hurting me. I don't see that as a business ethic, maybe a bad business practice to your customers or whatever.

Bad for surfers, none of my business if you do it:
Pop-ups.
Spam.
Pre-check xsales
Fake dating profiles
Limed Trial Member's areas

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Bad for webmasters, Bad Business ethics, you fucking others here.
Rip-off member's areas. (STEALING Content)
Spyware / scumware (STEALING Traffic)
Starting an illegal tube site (facilitating STOLEN Content )
Shaving (STEALING Joins)
Buying tube traffic (from illegal tubes?) (funding Sites that profit from STOLEN Content)


Huge difference between the 2 groups in my opinion.

I'm suprised to see shaving still so far up there. Considering it really is practiced as much anymore.

bump...for the day

Shaving is still alive and well, imo, but just practiced in ways that most webmasters don't consider since most people are accustomed to think of shaving as click fraud and don't think about the shady accounting practices like false credits/cancels etc.

Of course, figuring that out is a bit more complex and requires things like audits that most webmasters are not about to demand from their sponsors.

I started checking and it turned out that I checked almost all of them except popups.

Where is "All of above" option?

excellent post

I can't believe that popups are even an option. Doesn't almost every program have a console free option? Jesus, people.

Blah... if I look in Nifty by program under CCBILL and see since I started sending traffic, that I got 4 signups and 4 chargebacks i'm dropping that program no matter how good the content is... it doesn't happen too often, but it has happened and it's out there for sure. :disgust

I think "Rip-off member's areas" means a members area that sucks, not using stolen content. For example you are promoting a foot fetish site. The inside has about 1000 foot fetish pics then a shit load of feeds. That would be a rip off members area.

Anything to do with theft I'm against.

shavin,g spam, fake dating profiles, spyware, other ...

without a doubt spyware is the most unethical business practice.

or using web toolbars or .exe's to swap refcodes

Look one post up. Spyware/malware is still just that even if it pretends to do other shit.

I voted for others as well but shaving has to be number one. Here are people just trying to earn a living and helping you to make money and you cheat them out of what is rightfully theirs. Not only that but in many cases you know them and converse with them on places like GFY. It is like smiling in someone's face and pretending to be their friend the day after you robbed their home and stole the money they were going to use to feed their kids for the week.