It does not matter how much you spend on trying to secure your members details. If they can hack into the CIA, Military, security firms, Banks and other Gov agencys they sure as hell will get your members details if they really want them. One thing the internet is , is not safe and never will be.

I disagree, sure there is always some amount of uncertainty when doing anything online but good operational security usually works just fine in most circumstances. The hackers gave an interview in which they claim the password to access the root of all the servers and VPN's was simply Pass1234 to get thru BOTH layers...........then unencrypted member info. I mean come on, that is just plain terrible right? THey then just dumped all the info, it wasn't rocket science for them. AM did absolutely NOTHING about their security, they had none at all.

Should have paid with bitcoin.

they said they had their financial records too, now that I would like to see, if they are making as much as they say or it's really not all that profitable.

That will have to be discovered in the lawsuit if this claim survives the preliminary hearing.

I don't know and you don't know unless you have seen the data that was leaked.

I have not seen the data and never will even though it's everywhere but I didn't know if they released their financial stuff or not yet, if not I bet they will in the future to keep this alive even longer.

Wonder if any dating or dating related affiliate programs have quietly turned up the shave.

"It's all due to the AM hack! We're hurting too!"

If anything, an intelligent company would be adding affiliate sales to its best whales, hoping to prevent them from moving their traffic elsewhere. Shaving a few sales is a meaningless amount of money compared to preserving traffic from meaningful providers.

In the one sale every few months crowd shaving makes zero sense. Nobody making millions a year is sitting around thinking about ways to scam twenty bucks from a one sale affiliate. In fact, many companies don't want to deal with one sale affiliates at all anymore.

You sir are full of shit.

Want a clue? Check the AM processing before and after the hack -- same processor?

From what I have read to date in the media, customer credit card data was not compromised -- only truncated data xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-1234 by one account. The damages are only defamatory by the accounts cited ...

Not sure how this is playing in the media in other countries, but here in Canada whenever the news story is mentioned, the words "Canadian-based" are always used before Ashley Madison. Maybe Canadians are taking note of that.

Sure hope this blows over and everyone forgets about this whole incident soon. Seeing the lowest numbers on AFF these past 3 days that I have seen in quite some time. Sales were down almost 60% compared to historical stats. Please, please, please just be a statistical blip.

I didnt' mean the individual users financial stuff I meant company stuff, and I just read in a new article and they dumped all their financials now, how much he makes, his wife, all their ID's, ,passports, account numbers, cell phone numbers, daily revenue, affiliate info my god everything. 300k daily revenue. Wow the got just about everything.

As I mentioned at the start of this STFU News thread, trolling and nonsense will not be tolerated. You are welcome to say anyone is full of shit if you can present a valid counterpoint to what they have posted... just saying anyone is full of shit by itself does zero to advance the discussion. Please do better in your future replies or they will be deleted as previously explained.

As to Affiliate Payments, I would expect that Ashley Madison affiliates are about to get their outstanding payments wiped out entirely... I do not know that for a fact, but that is what I presume is about to happen. I don't think they will be 'shaving a few sales', I'd expect they are soon to be headed for bankruptcy protection and may be headed for having accounts frozen among a bunch of other legal obstacles. In other words, I don't think they will be able to pay their affiliates whether they want to or not, and I believe that affiliates are very low on their list of concerns at the moment.

On the other hand, I know for a fact that other sites in the dating space are very much more interested in retaining their traffic and their affiliates than they are in shaving anyone at the moment.

Avid Life Media sold a service to wipe people's details from Ashley Madison for a fee, which clearly did not happen, so where is the complicity of Avid Life in all of this ?

Noel Biderman desperately wants to shift the focus to the hackers, because his own culpability has to be downplayed if he is to survive this without jail time.


Two people may have committed suicide after Ashley Madison hack: police | SBS News

^What he said (except for the adding sales bit. Pretty sure that doesn't happen)^.

Affiliates like myself watch our stats religiously and anything that doesn't match our carefully tracked performance stats is quickly noticed. They know that many of us are just as sophisticated in our strategies and analysis as they are. Notice something peculiar or traffic isn't performing, and in my case I can change where my traffic goes with a single line of code.

Be rest assured, the large reputable companies aren't going to risk losing their top earners. That being said, there are some low life scum on this board that undoubtedly consider shaving to be an active part of their business strategy.

I would argue that one sale affiliates do have value as well. I would assume that they account for over 95% of the affiliates. (Programs like AFF have thousands of affiliates, but from past experience, I would say a handful of 50 or less account for the vast majority of the gross). And if you only make one sale, you are never going to reach the minimum payout, which means the program wouldn't have to payout anything on that single sale...no shaving required.

We are a relatively small AM affiliate, but what I've seen in the past week has blown me away. Paid sales are steady (but there's such a huge long-tail, I'm not putting a lot of credibility in those numbers), BUT free signups are up about 65%. Go figure....

Got a mail today, "in the wake of the AM leak", he wanted to know if his data is safe. So yes... clearly people are thinking about their previous purchases at adult-related sites...i'm sure it has some affect on future purchases....

Excellent thoughts....

To clarify:

I think many companies DO value one sale affiliates, however I do not think any would bother shaving one sale affiliates... it doesn't pay enough to be worth the time. While 95% of affiliates are of the one sale variety, 99% of sales do not come from them. There are much more profitable uses of their time and resources preserving the traffic from 99% of their sales than there are scamming traffic that generates less than 1% of their sales... and as you pointed out, the 99% of their sales come from professionals who understand net Earnings Per Click (EPC) - so 'shaving' would only serve to make that traffic go somewhere else.

One sale AM affiliates are likely to get shafted in the wake of this mess... and many probably STILL haven't changed their link codes to go somewhere else yet. Other reputable dating sites are brainstorming every idea they can to differentiate themselves from AM, to secure their own data, to preserve their own traffic sources, and to pick up the whales who used to send AM traffic but are now looking for new offers. They aren't wasting 30 seconds trying to create an elaborate scheme to shave a few bucks from a guy who is unlikely to ever reach the minimum payout threshold. :2 cents:

2 cents...

I agree they probably have not really considered affiliates at all as yet. I suspect they have ,as others have said, more pressing concerns.

As for shaving affiliates...in general....

to my knowledge the market is too competitive now to do that nowadays . Rule 1, never shave a whale, he will catch you, he has his own detailed stats and knows his traffic. (However even now , a big affiliate program will have 5-15% of its sales untracked. ie an unintentional shave. There are many ways this can happen despite the program trying to give an honest count)

takethebluepill...the reverse shave has been popular for years. Good affiliates are hard to get. Whales even rarer. You will do whatever you can to keep them happy so long as you can show a profit. However small, per join , spread per member lifetime relative to volume.

As for small affiliates, I used to manually credit people who were vocal on forums for example.

Specifically with AM... I think they have way too much on their plate to be looking at this hard yet.I have not seen the big 20-30g dump. But I would think in there is details of their affiliates perhaps if someone has seen this they would comment and remove the need for guessing?

And there is the heart of the lawsuit, how could information I paid to be completely deleted hacked?


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Worse still is that Ashley Madison seemed to do some hacking of their own.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/l...d-competitors/

OK. That needed clarification. Personally I could care less the CEO's personal info was revealed. That has no affect on my business -- not really of passing interest :2 cents:

What I am concerned of, and this might affect our business: Is consumer financial data or credit card account information, e.g.; account numbers, CVV number / Card Security Codes, address of banking data being compromised. I am concerned about our customers' willingness to make purchases ... that matters to me this instant. Also, the government regulations covering breaches of this nature are very costly, here in the USA anyway. As for the emails used: I guess if they didn't use a Gmail or Yahoo email account set up anonymously to 'cheat' on their wife -- oh well ...

It goes without mention that this is bad for customer confidence and adult website credibility and security. That will not be easy to address openly with customers, nor probably a wise thing to do.

As Rick correctly pointed out early in this thread, distrust of adult sites sends people to free porn. Why enter your card number in a pay site when you can keep yourself anonymous on a tube site instead. However that doesn't hold as true for dating. Even free dating sites require your information to be added and by their nature that includes contact info and personal details.

Unless someone offers encrypted dating and the public is willing to play cat and mouse with each potential mate to avoid putting any real details online - the public has a choice to either use dating sites or not... Because a site without their card number is just as revealing as one that has it if it gets hacked. People aren't freaking out that their card may be compromised, they are rightly worried their intimate details might be available to the public. Billing security actually has very little to do with this equation.

It couldn't have helped. If the extortionist hackers were after AM because they felt they were on a mission against bad guys, every bad guy action made AM more likely to be a target.