What have I learned thus far?

PPS is possible but very difficult. If done honestly, it absolutely requires certain variables to remain relatively constant and absolutely requires a lot of initial capital investment, as you have to be prepared to take a loss at least in the first month until the rebills kick in. And that doesn't include any overhead such as content, maintenance, chargebacks/refunds (for every refund, you have to make about 3 new sales to cover it and regain profit - affiliate gets paid, user gets his money back, chargeback fee gets covered), staff (if you have even one staff member making $30k per year, that's a lot of sales you're going to need to cover just that one staff member. If you have 5-10 staff members, you're going to need a whole lot more). If one was to map this into a graph the numbers would be staggering.

Variables that must stay constant include the ratio of trial to full joins, the ratio of cross sells to full join, the rebill rate, and the low chargeback/refunds (theoretically cbs/refunds should not be a factor because the number should be so small compared to overall sales).

Now the example given was $4.95 trial, $39.99 full subscription. Is this the norm? Are most sites charging $40 for 1 month of access these days? I was thinking around $29.99 or mid 30's at most. Changing the cost of the subscription will also dramatically affect the ability to do PPS. Charging $39.99 and paying out $35 on the $4.95 trial seems like it can work, though it would be effortful. Then can $40-$50 be paid on $4.95 trials that recur at say $29.99 or less?

One question for Marc. Were payouts such as $50-$75 PPS ever reasonable or were such high payouts simply off the chart and not possible to do in your opinion? We used to see many programs with those numbers 2 years ago. They're almost non-existent today.

Any program owner with a brain at all should have a solid spreadsheet to go by.

It's not like anybody is likely to get caught shaving. We all saw PIBCash's admin panel, yet they were doing fine before we all got a firsthand view at the shaving.

Is there any merit to Lensman's comment/challenge in the original thread where he stated Adult.com was going to use NAT's where he said something to the effect "Let's see how many other PPS programs paying what we do use NATS"?

Great thread indeed everybody.
And thumbs up to Marc De for his business acumen, and I'm not talking about his numbers only :)

Actually, just noticed that marc did say that his www sales only seem to be sales from people seeing a banner but not clicking it and going there now. I have no idea how he meassures this though, kinda weird to me.

Also no idea how he meassures that his program does correctly track 99% of the clicked referrals. I do not really understand how he knows that. There are always issues with that kind of stuff of course.

I second that :)

he most likely mean sales when the surfer dont sign-up instantly but days or weeks later, or even months, he knows the URL already, when the site has a good easy to remeber domain. Or the same surfer recommends the site to his friend, etc...

Read again.

many of the programs that were paying more then $50 a join were doing their own billing you can draw your own conclusions from that

$50-70+ pps is recruiting affiliates / generating hype (probably short-term), shaving and/or bad business.

Nothing wrong either with doing your own billing but the problem is those that were doing their own billing and being deceptive were in for the quick buck and are also the ones that have contributed to the stain that this industry is labled for with regards to processing.

Nathan, www sales are sales tracked from the type in of a domain. ie - the warning page has an account number on it that is an internal account number (not paid on) and you can track the productivity of that traffic.

Traffic generated from internal sources should NOT be used in determining the profitability of a PPS program. The reason www sales are calculated is because of the high visibility of the sites from being in a program, you get return customers and SE indexes from a lot of links that is in essence 'free'. www sales calculate a portion of the additional income category which include:

www sales
exit consoles
members upsells
mailing
other advertising avenues

I hope that helps :)

Why? Very few people are paying $40 om 2.95 trial .You picked an extreme that almost no one does to provide propaganda. Read the thread. Lots of us are making 30-35 per join with Lightspeed on his revshare and he keeps xsales and other stuff to himself. A PPS just pays us sooner to keep the webmasters happy.

Far-L, if you are referring to CeCash they have not paid $40 on a free trial for years. It is $25 for a free trial signup.

$35 PPS keeps the program honest in that they have to give the surfer what they were looking for. They need retention. 50% revshare with ccBill is for the mom and pop. Sometimes the site is good and you can pull close to $35 but 90% of the time after fees you are in the 20-25 range (persoanlly $23 for the year).
Webmasters use stats tools and those programs that give an accurate unique count and a high payout just get more traffic. Name the top three programs and look at how they got there.

Unfortunately these people were charging the surfer over $100 on the initial sign up with MULTIPLE cross sales. This really put a hurt on this business but that didn't stop people from cashing in on the $50 payouts... That is not about longevity at all.

We've used $75-100 payouts in the past as loss leaders to get people to look at our program. As you can see its become a staple of affiliate program marketing now, just like skinning boards and rewards points ;)

The reason we can track program accuracy is because we use referral links for EVERYTHING, including our own traffic. As I stated before, if you go to the www of any of the sites in the ARS program you'll see the warning page. When you click the 'ENTER' link it is a referral link with an internal account number. Its very easy to track these types of things.

like the great people of stiffycash :)

You'd be surprised how many program operators you just insulted hehe :)

That is what I like to refer to as the gravy or is it a 36 in plasma or 42 in plasma this week....LOL

even if you don't do that... every sale that is not bought in by a webmaster who gets no credit on a sale is a "www sale"...
not even need to track those.. :)

pps makes loads, if you know how to work the traffic

Very keen Marc

Thats all I wanted to understand ;) I do realize you can track type ins, most of our clients do that, but I was not 100% sure what exactly you did count as www sales... Also, it might be easy to meassure the general www sales, BUT what you can not track is why they typed it in, or what SE they came from and why you got indexed there... It could be that it is because you have the PPS program, it could very well also be because it is a sale from a surfer that you sent to the site originally from internal traffic sources... so it IS not 100% accurate and correct to count those sales into the PPS profitability and it is very hard to figure out how much of a percentage of those www sales should be calculated in.

Of course non referred sales because of technical issues (or a list of other possible issues) is gravy, but again, we run 99-100% referral rate. In fact today we're running 100% referred. You can't count on errors to account for any profitability or 'free' sign ups.

Now you're pulling teeth :) www sales are mostly generated by promotional material, previous visitors, and previous customers.

Marc no one is saying that. There is a reason why so many webmasters rushed back to ARS with their new sites and models. You made us all money in the past, and we want back on the train.

:thumbsup

Do rewards points affect all of this? And no one is mentioing size bonuses.

Also the number one thing a Program needs is a big dog site. One site that kills for a while. These make the whole PPS or revshare a mute point I bet. Example, milf hunter, bang bus or tawnee stone. Topcash and TCG did this with their reality change over.

Like I said already in my previous reply, I know what tracking is and how to do it. But you posted in an older post:

How do you track a referral rate on a referred click? Most likely I am misunderstanding what you are saying here, but what it looks like is that you say you know that of every referred click 99.5% actually get credited to the right reseller. But 0.5% are somehow not, BUT you STILL know they ARE referred clicks? What exactly do you mean by this? How do those 0.5% get created or tracked?

Just curious here...

Well ;) Thats what these discussions are for, no? To get as much info and as much depth as possible...

If you say most are promo material, previous visitors and previous customers.. that would mean you can never submit your site to SEs or optimize them, since all that traffic is in-house in my oppinion, no? OR you would somehow track those sales using another affiliate code I guess, but that also would be a pain to achive accurately.

A referred click would be a click through going through our referral script. We can track a sale back to a referring account if it doesn't go through our referral script. As you pointed out, you know what tracking is and how it works... Go off that knowledge base.

The 0.5% that didn't get referred yesterday would be based upon server errors, net errors, user errors, scripting errors, DB errors, a huge list could follow but you get the point. Our systems are very accurrate.

Also, your comment on generating traffic or SE work - you simply use another internal account number.

slapass - a big site makes things easy... ARS had 3 big sites, Adult Movie Station, All Petite, and MILF Search :)

Right now we're doing big numbers with XXX Teen Tease and Chicks Go Both Ways.

Marc, did you start your programs off as revshare way way way back whenever you launched and then eventually moved into the PPS arena? Like how did you bankroll it in the beginning?

Haven't you heard of "per confirmed signup"?

If it didn't work or it wasn't profitable We wouldn't be doing it.
Why should we show you how to be profitable with it? some know how and some will go broke. 8 years of experience in PPS and we have gone broke a couple times till we learned the formula.

Nice read.

Sure I can make it work.

Pay on primary processor only and keep all secondary and checks is a good place to start. I'm smarter than you are giving me credit for. Don't be so defensive. This was a thread to educate and attain knowledge not an attack on any specific program. My intention is not to bash but rather to discuss and so far Marc is the only one who has participated and was very informative.

At first glance I felt like it was slamming PPS programs I do apologize.
But the truth of the matter is I don?t think any of the PPS programs or at least the successful ones who are mainly sponsors are not going to give away the golden goose. We have paved the way and helped many with the information available these days and it?s only hurt us. Or at least that?s how I feel.

There are a ton of variables when it comes to running a program.
The PPS model works when you have built up a member?s database.
Because the first 6 months to a year you will be in the negative so you have to have some capitol to back it up unlike a rev-share program.

There are also a lot of factors involved in how you run your business and maintain a low overhead.

I?ve seen many programs fold Revshare and PPS programs over the years it?s all about numbers.

PPS is very competitive and you can easily loss everything if you don?t know what your doing been there done it but we?ve learned from our experience. You have to continually tweak and find ways to increase your revenue every little thing adds up.


This is why it?s important to back your sponsors who keep putting back into the industry. I don?t do business with anyone who doesn?t. Just because a rev-share program looks good doesn?t mean it will perform well or make it. That?s why I only trust those who have experience and history in the industry before I promote them.

Nathan, its quite simple. The affialtes promote the sites and so people start searching for those domains, type ins increase, movies are downloaded and spread around the net, banners and url's are remembered. whatever it is, its about 25% of most programs sales are from sales not tracked to affilates.

And the good thing about promoting a PPS model is you get most of that money because the PPS model programs depend on those untracked signups and all their upsales and mailings to ex members to pay out that $35 per signup. If your promoting recurring programs you dont' get NONE of that money from untracked or type in sales.

Typeins increase with the more affilates pushing the sites, and the more traffic the more typeins and free signups to the program. Doesn't make the PPS programs rich because they already accounted for that 25% and are paying the affilate that as part of the $35 for the $4.95 trial.

Recurring is nice for monthly income but PPS is best for total money.

BTW I forgot to mention that webmasters will make allot more with a PPS program with a sponsor who knows what there doing then any other model. plus you have the security that we will pay and be around for a while.

then again everyone has there own opinion on this. only time will tell...

Marc so your cookies don't work when the affialtes type in the domain name, you cut those sales off for yourself. That has to add another 5%+ to the WWW typein sales i'm sure.

Not a bad idea, allows you to pay higher payouts. One of the ways you do the $40 per signup on ARS now I guess.

Good stuff and thanks for the info Marc. Your numbers are a little scary to me, if you really take 10 months to make money, we can do the same in half the time or less but we all have our different pricing and business models for our different programs.

Your certainly ahead of the pack with your EMX.com billing model, nice conversion ratio's on that I saw the join process first hand after signing up. 80%+ conversions i'm sure :-) nice work doing that new billing model its something that will be copied many times over like g3x.com has done.

What it comes down to is the one who can payout the most and make a profit will do well. That?s why we have a few PPS models because webmasters with volume demand different things.

Its all about Volume and Branding

If there was a standard in this business everyone would be Rich.

How sites track visitors is relevant as well, and many do it differently. Session ID's, cookies etc. can men missed payouts to affiliates - and I promote a few sites that use those techniques. I'm sure I've missed some sales and the sponsor is getting 100% of the sale.

In any event, ANY site also gets non-referred sales. The % is a complete mystery to me but correct me if I'm wrong - but doesn't a healthy number of non-referred sales help balance the books?

What it comes down to is the one who can payout webmasters the most and make a profit will do well. That?s why we have a few PPS models because webmasters with volume demand different things.

Its all about Volume and Branding

If there was a standard in this business everyone would be Rich.

Hey, thanks for the compliment! EMX is doing KILLER, both sales wise and conversion wise. We're doing over 500 / day and soon to breech 1000 / day! :) Its quite profitable too.

On the front about cookies and www sales - we don't take any www sales by not crediting a sign up by any means. Only if the surfer goes to www on their own from a referral, seeing it on a banner, or repeat business. Again we maintain a near perfect ref % from all referred traffic! :)

25% is wayyyyy high on the number of sales coming from those types of sales... but again in that 20% figure of additional income I use, the non referred (www) sales are just a portion of it.

Also we don't use cookies to track sales, too flakey for something that important.

fraud is a big probelm with pps, you better have good ways of detecting it

80% trial to monthly sounds good

lest we not forget that 99% of these programs have a 5-15% shave... whether blatently or by not paying on dialers or other things that you may not notice.....

but this is all hush hush hush... but i'll say it anyways.

Marc, Happy to see EMX is doing very well. You guys are doing a good job on the VOD front.

Jay
www.objectcube.com

Slappass: I was only speaking of the CE program in the past tense. Actually, to its credit, CE was one of the first companies to lower PPS payouts.

It's so interesting that you say this. This is the the primary reason why I almost exclusively promote revshare sites

It's so interesting that you say this. This is the the primary reason why I almost exclusively promote revshare paysites.