so does this also mean paysites will be whacking a quarter of their content out of the site ? seems like a reasonable thing ... the surfer is now going to be dinged three quarters of the price. give them what they pay for ... :1orglaugh

berg.the.red - hahaha ;)

Yep, two years ago CE lowered their payouts, that's why there are no changes over there :)

FM - very true!! :)

That's an understatement :)

Those were my exact words.

I can easily churn out 20 different websites where the only obvious difference is the domain name and splash page layout. I can easily tell the surfer he's gonna get tons of facial/goth/fat/whatever content inside my site and then just give him the same content/plugins as all my other sites. But that member isn't gonna stick around for long unless he forgets to rebill. And he might even chargeback.

psyko514 - if you are trying to compare your scenario to Global's sites, I just went inside their members areas. They all had content specific to their niche and a SHIT load more. Not sure what you are speaking of...

i'm not pointing the finger at any specific program. i'm just saying it happens alot and it shouldn't.

You lowered them for a couple of months but then you raised them above where they were before you lowered them.

Follow me free paid $50 per active....then you lowered it to $40....then you raised it to $55.

Free trials paid $25 flat...then you canned the program and moved everyone to pay per active.
Now you pay $20 flat plus $5 per rebill, which is basically the same as paying out $25 flat.

WHAT lower payouts?

BB, Visa only told the merchants that their ratio must be under 1%. Visa did not say "you must stop offering free trials, you must do this, you must do that".
Look at all of the threads here and on all of the webmaster boards of speculation about what the programs might do in order to be under 1%.

Silvercash and ARS were the first ones to step up, take responsibility, and say "We're making changes. We're dropping free trials, and we're lowering payouts."
It takes balls to do that. How many webmasters do you think are hard at work changing out their Silvercash and ARS links right now? They *will* lose webmasters and traffic due to this - most likely to CECash, which has announced it's going to do neither. (I see CECash getting slammed with TGP traffic very soon.)

Yes, the industry has needed it for a long time. Staying competitive with other large programs made it nearly impossible to do, because of the loss of webmasters and traffic you'd suffer.
These two programs are the FIRST to do it - and even though it needed to be done anyway, they still deserve huge kudos for being the first ones to step up to that line and say "we'll be responsible - who's going to follow us?"

Now if someone could just reassure me that the AVS model isn't going to go tits up or move to a fee-structured IPSP model within the next 6 months, I'd be so happy about everything that's happening tonight I'd be bouncing off of the walls. There are GOOD things coming in this industry for the folks who stick around. To those that are getting ready to take their ball and go home, hurry up and get out already! Flee the "sinking ship" while you can! (More traffic for the rest of us...) *evil grin* :glugglug

BTW, Thank you, Marc!

I think there is one major thing that is missing here when we are talking about lowering payouts. We dont have to do anything. Like Marc said its a chance for us to improve things for the longevity of the industry. $39.99 per month for our sites? You have to be kidding me? They arent worth that much. No way!
And then you go and cross sale them twice for 39.99.. Its crazy. So by loweing the charges to 29.99 and 19.99 we are going to less chargebacks and the few if any programs stay at $40 they are going to find out what we have known for years. The webmaster fraud which is at least 50% of the chargeback problem to begin with is going to go to the programs paying more. Paying $40 per join makes you a bigger target and believe me between our people and Paycoms efforts we find between 10 and 30 fraudulant webmasters per week. Not to mention that we are now charging for cross sales and not making them free is going to up the transactions as well.

Yes we helped create the monster we are trying to detain now. But we are taking the correct steps to do so.

You also mention these programs that have no chargebacks, take a look and you'll see that they are usually a company offering single site with great niche content that they can put a lot of time into. When your running an affilitate program there is a lot more that pertains to marketing stratagies and obtaining traffic by covering as many niches as you can. There was a period there where everyone was adding a ton of sites. I wish I had the man power to make them as personalable as some sites out there but you have to say my members ares are some of the better ones our there for a program with as many sites as we have.


Someone posted on Oprano earlier that they didnt like the idea of 25 dollar signups but their mortgage payment sure did. We are looking long term.

Correct me if I'm wrong - that sounds like good news :)

I just wanted to say that I can understand why surfers are unhappy with sites. After having seen several members areas in the past few years, I was appalled. Most of those that advertised exclusive content had very little of it, maybe 25-50 sets, MAX. Those that offered downloadable movies usually had 100 or less downloadable clips (usually poor quality and low resolution) and thousands of crappy streaming movies that took forever to load and were too small to see even at broadband size.

And most of the plugins are a JOKE. The movie plugins basically offer stReaming loads of horse shit. The picture plugins I looked through had thousands of pictures, sure. But the largest pic I saw in ANY of the picture plugins I saw was 600 pixels on the longest side. I could get this from TGPs for free! I know they have to keep bandwidth costs down, but this was absolutely ridiculous.

The single best paysite I have ever been in (and the ONLY one I would ever have considered rebilling to had I been on a paid membership) was Busty Amateurs. They had exclusive content, large images and even downloadable zips of all the image sets for people who wanted to look at them offline. Now THAT was quality. I was a webmaster, though, I wasn't paying. But yes, I have joined several paysites and no, I didn't rebill to any of them.

I joined on movie site once a few years ago that promised thousands of downloadable movies and once inside I found ZERO downloadable movies. I looked for around 2-3 hours. Not only did I cancel my membership but I asked for a refund of the trial price just 3 hours after joining. :(

I have not been into many paysites recently, mostly because I'm afraid to. I don't even want to waste $5 or less on a trial only to risk cancelling 5 seconds too late and being rebillied if the site is total crap.

I can only imagine how many surfers are afraid of the same thing.

Carrie, since you appear to have skipped the Epoch thread, they are no longer allowing free trials as of two weeks from now. CE is apparently one of the few sponsors still offering them.

good on you for copping to this.

ihave a feeling we are going to see new partner programs emerge with a small amount of niche sites which all have different members areas with the content neccasary to keep members to that specific niche. some companies may be about to lose a bundle... but some "unknown" companies are about to blow up....

I was just pointing out that you said you lowered payouts two years ago which is why you say you don't have to make any changes today.

I was wondering where that lower payout was?

If you can do the 3 day free trial that rebills at $50 and stay under 1% then that's great news.

just wondering why you have to lower payouts if your already way below 1%?

actually i can prob answer that myself the new epoch rules are going to decrease your revenue quite a bit?

Free trials rebilling at a higher rate, and cross-sells is what paid those high payouts.
You don't honestly think that *every* join you send stays long enough on his own to pay $50 for your payout *and* more $$ so that the program makes some money too, do you?

I agree with everyone that quality is important but I believe good customer relations is just as important .

When we started Porn Gate last year our philosophy was to give the members more than what they expected and be responsive on a personel level with every member that emailed or posted on our message boards.
We can do this because each webmaster in the group is focused on quality and customer relations. We don't use plugins at all and I don't think we ever will. I don't see the point in using plugins when so many other sites have them as well.

However we are still learning and I'm sure we will make mistakes but we will immediatly rectify them. In this biz you never stop learning :)

In 2 of my sites our members request specific shoots and we shoot the content for them and invest a high % of our profits to doing this. It has worked well for us and we have grown steadily for over a year now. yeah yeah I know we are still babies compared to the big guys but we are happy with what we have :)

We will be launching our PGbucks program shortly

interesting discussion for sure but i dont really worry at all.
i know im going to be paid less... donno how it will effect the signup volume - i will have to see and wait

but what i know:
quality more and more and even MORE matters in this industry.
reason: surfers know what they can get having access to free 100000000 pictures on 2451241 TGPs. Im sure that some of the biggest ripoffs in the industry will suffer very hard in the next month and its GOOD!!! Very good!

charging surfers 40bucks + 2 times 30 bucks via cross is wrong i think..

we have to deal with the same issue we had to deal with the dialers not that long ago!
anyone remember??

surfers being charged 9 bucks per min comes to my mind...


this industry was begging for changes... now
HERE THEY ARE
so lets take the chance and profit from it

my :2 cents:

Well I was pretty sure that I would'nt get any answers from the big guys on my questions but here's another one for those lowering payouts by about $10/signup.

Are you still going to have popups (that we get nothing from) to steal our traffic that doesn't sign up for a site we get credited for?

I bet there will be more aggresive upselling in the members area to make up for this so I don't see how lowering payouts is the right thing to do and by $10 each! That's a little much I think.

I think paysite owners are sticking it to the webmasters and I for one will be pushing my traffic to those that either

a.) don't lower payouts at all
b.) lower the payouts in a smaller amount than $10/signup
c.) lower the payouts and get rid of those consoles that steal our hard earn, filtered traffic we send them all friggen day long.

Don't give me $10 less unless you are planning on taking a BIG cut in your profits.

I dont' build sites 16+ hours/day, buy content, buy traffic, filter traffic and send it off to your paysites so you can pop a console in front of it and get the profit from the sale yourself!

And then if they don't join through your entry console, or your site, you pop up even more shit for them to try to get any money out of them you can which in turn takes that surfer away from going back to my tgp, traffic source etc where he may find something else to signup for that I get paid for!

Pay me $30+ a signup and you can dick my traffic around and steal money outta my pocket but pay me $20 or $25 a signup and I think it's time to rethink how agressive your sales techniques that I don't get credited for are!

And then I won't even get into those recurring programs that have popups! Why do we, the webmasters who make these paysites so big, put up with this?

Why us webmasters bend over and take this everyday is beyond me. The excuse was always (if we are going to pay $35 a signup we have to do the popups every other dirty trick in the book. Bullshit if that were the case, you wouldnt' be driving fancy cars and buying your 4th vacation home!)

The bottomline is the big paysite owners will STILL be buying new toys while us little guys are struggling to pay for our one home and one, not so fancy, car!

Do I sound pissed? Yes, because I knew damn well nobody would answer my questions and that's all the answers I needed to know who's getting shafted with this new 1% chargeback ratio crap and it's not the paysite owners!

What's a 20% or so cut in profits to a huge paysite owner who has more money than he will ever need to live the high life? Oh he may have to buy a corvette instead of a viper this month? Cmon! These guys could retire on the money they have now! They don't have to stay in the biz they just want more, more, more. So screw the webmasters and keep growing your monthly income! Nice move!

I'm talking paysites in general here and if you take this personally than you are probably one who is doing us webmasters wrong!

If I wanted to make someone else rich while I had little chance of getting there myself I would work at Mcdonalds :)

$10 lower payout per signup don't seem like much but mutiply that by like 100, 200, 500 signups/month and see how much a webmaster can lose in this. Which is alot to some webmasters. If the paysite owners lost that a month they wouldn't even notice it was gone.

I think paysites should stop spending big money on advertising and let their affiliates do the advertising and make the profit from it. In the mainstream biz it is frowned upon when the biz outbids the affiliate for an advertising spot etc why not the adult biz also?

Stop paying thousands of dollars a month in advertising and recruiting new affiliates and maybe you wouldn't have to lower the payouts so much? Just a thought.

Very interesting replies and very positive also.
My own personal view is this will be great for our industry.

Maybe the surfer will get it out of their heads that all adult sites are out trying to scam them.

Oz

It was going to happen sooner or later....

You need to seriously work on your attitude and stop sending traffic to the big boys you are criticizing and send the traffic to your own sites instead.

This is a dog eat dog world. And this is a piranha eat piranha industry. The sooner you go for it yourself and work to be a piranha and not a goldfish you'll be rich too.

if the change happens october 1 then why u lowering payouts now?

thats 2 1/2 months to go

customers that signup now will be charging back in 2-3 months.

With all that work, you may as well start your own sites and pop your own consoles.

I only wonder why Pornkings are also going to reduce payouts, if they cb ratio is 0.67%..... ?

hard to take a day off in this industry,because something bad is always about to happen....we saw this one coming long time ago. Good or bad? It's a change that doesn't come from us and this is enough for me to tell me it's not our advantage.


to sum up,among the rest things........

free trials belong to the past right?

Does this apply for lower payouts as well?

read the whole thread.

Soul_Rebel,

CECash will not lower payouts & still offers Free Trials :thumbsup

I agree that Marc is trying to come across as the webmasters friend when so far all we have seen is a 10.00 cut to join prices which is downloaded to the affiliate in a 10.00 cut in payout?

How much will you share of this new and brave thing your doing for the industry (that the butt kissers keep on praising you for) LOL

I say these things very strongly because its oh so funny for those of us who have not had trials for over 2 years and we have taken pride in our members areas, refusing to use plugins and doing our best to come up with unique content. We also take pride in our low cb's.

There is obviously two business models... one that says we do the bare minimum for customers and most of them are newbies so they dont know any better and another who realizes that its fucking expensive to GET new customers all the time and its very frugal to keep those you already have happy.

The problem is that visa is not seeing the two business models...yet... they are about to see the difference though.



Marc a question hopefully you will have time to answer... what is visa saying in the new rules... if you have a cb in any one month that is over the 1% usa signup will you get fined? or immediately your program is in jeopardy of loosing the visa processing? Is there some sort of scale on which you are judged? What happens if you run 3% for 12 months is it just fines? This part I am not sure of as my processor is not making any of these changes.

hey shap, i see you're stirring up shit (as usual) ;)

cheers man :glugglug

thanks FabianC

Everyone keep in mind, when prices are lowered for the consumer the sales transactions increase. So you will take a hit on the lower payout but hopefully get more sales to offset it.

lol I don't need to work on my attitude! My thoughts are probably the same thing others are thinking on here that don't have the balls to say anything or ask similiar questions.

I had always planned to send my traffic to one of my own programs, (which will now take longer to achieve my own sites because of payout cuts)

If it's a dog eat dog world and the paysite owners are piranhas, that's fine. BUT, they come on here making promises, saying they'll make more money for everyone's traffic etc but in reality they are just looking for the next sucker to come along so they make the big money off of them and not another program.

They act like they are great people who want to help webmasters make money when most of them are staring at each webmaster and their traffic and wondering how many more webmasters they need to recruit to buy their next viper. Not who can I help make money today, who can I form a partnership with today that all sides make decent moola, but who can I make money the most money from today. And I KNOW there are a few good ones out there, just gotta weed out the good from the bad.

Cecash could EASILY have jumped on the bandwagon and lowered their payouts $10 but they didn't! Why because they are not using this new rule as a way to make even more profit while the webmasters lose money.

I applaud cecash for stepping up and taking the risk. (there is a risk right? After all, the rest of the paysite owners say it can't be done)

And I think it's funny how other paysite owners think Cecash is wrong because they are NOT cutting webmasters pay or free trials etc. This makes all the others who are cutting the per signup price look damn bad because if cecash can do it why can't ANYONE else?

But this is an industry where if the paysite owners can jump on the bandwagon to higher their profit level they damn well will as seen by how many have posted here within minutes and hours of the first few announcements.

Did EVERY one of these programs really look at their revenue, profits, chargeback ratios, etc and figure out that $10 less per signup was what HAD to be done or did they pull that figure outta their asses? Some of them may have done an analzyes but I guarantee some didnt' and just followed along with the rest because well THEY CAN.

If is wasn't for goldfishes their would be no piranhas! Well unless you are Quiet :)

If Pk And the hun etc stopped allowing programs that cut the pay by such a big amount to be on their sites and stopped promoting them, how much more money would the sponsors be losing then?

Would LOVE to see a years worth of books for a big paysite program and see how much they were NOT losing by offering big payouts with all those cross sales, popups and upsells in the members area.

One surfer who left the box checked would be worth $110 to them! What percentage of those charged back? Or cancelled before they were charged or stayed for months! I get $35 they get $110+ I realize there is an average in all of this but I guarantee these paysites make a hell of alot more off a surfer than they lead us to believe!

It's the lies and they way they all stick together to pull the wool over our eyes that pisses me off. It's the dishonesty and lack of knowing the definition of the word "partner". We are here to help build up their membership base and income, they are here to help build up our income. Or at least that is what they lead webmasters to believe. When in reality they stick it to the webmaster any way they can to make sure their bottomline keeps going up and up while the webmasters' keeps going down.

Don't tell me my surfer is worth $25 to you when in reality they are worth $50 or $75. No need to lie is what I'm getting at.

Do you think that tgps, advertising spots like cybercat etc are going to lower their prices if a huge percent of sponsors lower their payouts? What about hosts? I will guess no.

My income has been going up quite nicely the last 6 months and I had plans which are now going down the toilet and if its absolutely a must to lower payments fine, I'll have to live with it, I'll just have to work harder and smarter. But I refuse to work harder for a program that is cutting their per signup payout and not taking it in the ass right along side me :)

But if it's a lie that $10 less is a MUST then yes, I'm pissed. But of course we will never get that answer from the owners themselves on just how they figure our surfers are now worth $10 less, we will never know.

Where did this magical $10 figure come from? This was the reason for my original post to try to understand the workings of a paysite so I could justify that they are being honest and a $10 cut per signup really was something they HAVE to do to keep from losing an amount of money they just couldn't afford.

So bottomline, the webmasters are still paying the same amount of money to make LESS money. If you dont' understand this, I don't know how else to spell it out. So instead of continually growing we are forced to spend even more money and time to keep our income at what it is now. Does anyone understand what I am trying to say here?

If you own a paysite and are contemplating cutting x amount of dollars per signup, think about the below instead!

Get rid of the hosted galleries, save on your bandwidth bills and gallery designers pay, get rid of the paying more to ppl who send more traffic etc. Why is my surfer only worth $25 if I send say 100 signups/month to your program but if someone else sends 120 signups/month to your program, his surfer is worth $30??

Get some decent free content weekly that I can use to promote your sites with. (before anyone pipes in and says free content is overexposed, bullshit. I make lots of money using free content BUT with the amount of work I do, I need to buy content too) Your sites are full of content, let us use some of it regularly. Get rid of your free hosting. If someone can't afford $30/month to host their galleries they are in the wrong business! Then I see no reason to lower the payouts at all and you keep the experienced webmasters promoting your sites.

Webmasters who count on the income instead of kids who hope to make money in the biz. Those who live with mommy and do this for beer money etc. How many signups do those that HAVE to use free hosting really send a site per month?

By doing the above you will save MUCH more money than cutting signups. Do you think webmasters will care if you get rid of your hosted galleries if you are paying them $10 more per signup than anyone else???

Hosted galleries are nice if you own a huge traffic source but other than that they are useless and more overexposed than free content. There's a big difference in seeing the same content than seeing the exact same gallery all over the place.

Sponsor free hosting sucks as they play dirty little tricks redirecting foreign traffic and popping dialers and getting the gallery submitter banned etc. Plus it's more widely open to abuse.


I would pick a sponsor with no hosted galleries, no free hosting, etc that pays $30+ a signup than a sponsor who cut the pay down to $25 and has hosted galleries. He is cutting my pay so he can say "I offer free hosting and galleries" I really don't care if you do, I pay for my own dedicated servers, bandwidth, content, traffic and I shouldn't be penalized while others use your free hosting, galleries and bandwidth.

There ya go a solution to the problem. Those that use free hosting and your bandwidth for hosted galleries, pay them less, not me! If they use free hosting and your hosted galleries, pay them $5 or $10 less, not webmasters who dish out thousands of dollars a month to send you more traffic!

I have outlined many many ways to lower your outgoing cashflow instead of cutting per signup $$ and I'm sure someone somewhere will find it useful, or at least I hope so.

End of rant for now :)

Are you sure?

If you were right we would see a war of sorts between the programs in lowering their join prices in order to make more sales and more money.

Although there was a thread that described the effect of 1% and how its calculated. If you have more numbers of sales and one of em charges back the percent is lower. Although there is apparently another way its calculated and I didnt see the rationale for which way they would use under which circumstances (other then I assume they use the best way to keep the numbers down? maybe a processor can answer that) But the other way is the dollar calculation... so 100 x any sign up price with 1 chargeback is going to be 1% but if you can up your sign ups becuase of a low join price you might get 200 signups to every 1 cb.

That is....if all the reasons that people charge back are atleast kept the same... removing those reasons will hopefully lessen the chargebacks even more. Maybe with both these changes these programs can end up under 1% afterall.

thefreakybeaver, you really don't get it, do you?

they aren't cutting the prices/payouts in order to save money. they are doing it to reduce chargeback rates.

many programs are looking at their sites and saying "wow, this really isn't worth $40 a month". in this very thread, LAMike said "$39.99 per month for our sites? You have to be kidding me? They arent worth that much. No way!"

because their sites aren't worth $40 a month, the surfer charges back because he feels ripped off. this was fine when the ratio was 2.5% but this isn't fine at 1%.

so now they are lowering the prices so the surfer won't feel ripped off.

No, I think I am getting the jist of it. These paysite owners are saying that MOST chargebacks come from fraudlent webmasters and ppl who are conned into joining a site via free trial or low price trial and already checked cross sale boxes.

How is lowering the cost per month even relative to that at all??? I can't see joe surfer saying damn I'm paying $39.99/month for this shit I'm charging back. But if he sees $29.99 he'll be happy as a pig in shit and stay? Or just cancel and not chargeback? Doesn't seem logical but of course as I have stated I'm not into the "secrets" of running a paysites.

And I dont' see joe surfer with dick in hand saying wow only $29.99/month to join cool and whips out his credit card more often than if he saw $39.99/month.

Or joe surfer looking at his credit card statement wondering where the hell this charge of $39.99 came from and feeling ripped off. Isn't he going to feel just as ripped off if it's only $29.99? I know I sure would. I watch my statements closely and any $ amount that I didnt' authorize or KNEW I was authorizing is going to get the same reaction out of me no matter what the amount is.

So you are saying the paysite owners are lowering the consumers costs by $10 but also the webmasters by $10 so who is losing the money here? The webmaster not the paysite owner. Why don't they eat 50% of that $10 they decided on their own to save the consumer?

So even taking your comment into account, lower the signup price $10 for the consumer, cut your extras you offer like free hosting etc and keep the webmaster pay the same. Is this really something that cannot be done? If the MAJORITY of paysite operators say yes than I apologize but I think I'm on to something here that may not have been thought through. They think they HAVE to offer free hosting, hosted galleries etc to stay competitive when I say fuck the extras SHOW ME THE MONEY :)


I dont' think us webmasters demand higher payouts when they raise their cost to the consumer, why should we lose out when they lower it?

Say today they lower the price to $29.99 and lower the webmasters payout by $10 per signup. In a few months if they see it's not working and decide for whatever reason to raise the price back to $39.99 do you think they will announce it here? And even better higher their payouts by $10 again? Ha ha from what I read I would say NO DAMN WAY!

All I am saying is that THERE IS a way around it to NOT lower the webmasters payout per signup and those that are smart will figure it out and use it to their advantage and these are the ones that will make more money in the long run period.