Things are pretty bad for me on ccbill too.

Jan 01 - April 30 2010
1 : 445

May 01-10 1 : 419
May 11-20 1 : 455
May 21-27 1 : 669


Yesterday was 1 : 1101
Last ccbill week 05/16/2010 - 05/22/10 was my worst since Nov 11-28th 2009.
This week is on pace to be wore than lasts.

PS. Nats is all time high, my best month with nats and non ccbill programs since I started in 2004. And it's not because I've started promoting nats more.

Traffic is as usual, gallery views are high. Rebills on ccbill are also way down.

hahaha.. this is too funny.

Also getting hit with chargebacks on top of it. 4 This week :(

On my end it is getting better and better: Wednesday May 26 was the best day in CCBILL sales since May 17.
Thursday May 27 is even better...

patvax. hit me up on icq 78478691 i need more webbies for regular stats chit chat.

I am out for about 3 hours now, but will do so arround 11:00 AM GMT (UTC)

Im a sponsor, and Im wondering if what I offer is something that 'sells at a profit.' Since I am more focused on building a long-term brand for David's work, and in less than 15 months the site currently pays for itself plus a little production buffer, even in this shitty time, I dont see any real way we can ever go out of business. David will keep producing and coming up with new art-nude ideas for our soft-based site, and I will keep promoting it...pretty much resulting in nothing less than continuous growth.
What we have had to do in the last 4 months is move into brand new selling arenas. That is proving to be the answer for our soft-core. Web subscription sales are now only a part of the puzzle.

For example, David put together a few new print books here : http://stores.lulu.com/davidnudes

And we have put out ultra soft-core dvds into the retail market in various mainstream stores. Those are now beating our web sales 10:1, but the profit margin on retail is not the same as a web subscription. But the dumber consumer that is buying our retail stuff is then pushed to go try the site, which has 300% more content for the same price. Thats our new model for soft-core. I dont think this model will help hard-core though, as you cant really cross over into mainstream with pee pee :)

What Im trying to figure out now is how to get the affiliate community involved on our retail side. That would entail getting proper affiliates to be willing to sign up to a new program that pays out on our eStore products under a central roof. CCBill is what we currently use and most affiliates trust, but their payment processing system is not suited for shopping cart and shipping experiences that the average customer is now used to from regular eCommerce sites.

If Google had an affiliate system to plug into their Google Checkout shopping system, then I bet a lot of affiliates would trust that system and try to use it.

But, to sum up this loooong post, our strategy is to squeeze every creative inch of our little brains ever day, trying to come up with more and more outlets for David's original content. That, I think, is the answer to next-gen soft-core. For every flavor out there though, I 100% believe all our problems would be solved if we ditched all the free content, retire all TGP sites (Those that refuse could be shut out by never getting good free content from sponsors anymore), and for marketers and affiliates to invent a few new ways to promote our products for sale.

leave the business or start your own ... the question is now

On top of all the problems I am facing I had 2 of my TGP/MGP servers out for about 16 hours due to a router issue at my host's end...
That issue is solved and all is back again.

I made some CCBILL sales early this morning but now for 8 hours 0 CCBILL sales.
NATS is on a normal level...

We're into Memorial Day Weekend here in the US now, plus the "unofficial" start of summer (and thus, 'summer slowdown') so all bets are off now. LOL

I know all of that but despite this and despite the fall out of 2 of my servers between Thursday and Friday morning (a part of my network was down for 16 hours due to a serious hardware failure between the datacenters of one of my hosts!) I begin (I SAY: BEGIN) to see kind of normal figures.
The timeframe from May 17 - May 25 was a total disaster for my CCBILL sales.
Since Wednesday May 26 the sales went up again and for me it is getting better and better.

I hope for all of you guys that you all will see the same patterns on your end.

I cannot believe there was nothing changed between May 17 - May 25 in the way the credit cards were processed for the CCBILL sales.

hu ? did you mean "the question is how" or "the time is now" ?

Ratios are returning to 'normal' levels but it was still a shitty week, and a highly stressful one because of everything posted here in this thread.

When ppl ask me what I do for a living I tell them: "online internet sales' or 'online marketing'. When I tell them my "lifestyle" - basically work whenever I want, however I want, and make decent money - they get VERY envious. But then I ask THEM:

"So how would you like to live your life not knowing what your paycheck will be each week? Hmmm? One week it's UP a few hundred bucks, next week it's DOWN a few hundred bucks."

They laugh and say "No thanks". LOL So there ya go.

PS Pata: gonna hit you up on ICQ this weekend. :)

yawn....

All what you say is true. It is getting better and better.

You can best reach me during the week on ICQ.
I have added you on ICQ and would like to be in contact with you (and also some other repliers here) in futur to discuss sales, ratios, ...
Keep in mind that I am in Europe and that I work every day from 08.30 AM till 11.30 PM with some breaks during that time.

Some bald stats from my long-standing relationship with Kink.com:

Aug-Dec 2007: 1:1079, 273 new sales, (annualized 655), revenue per unique visitor $.05
2008: 1:1392, 535 new sales, revenue per unique visitor $.049
2009: 1:1735, 536 new sales, revenue per unique visitor $.028
2010 so far: 1:2113, 180 new sales (annualized 432), revenue per unique visitor $.021

May 2010 to date: 1:2912, 24 new sales (annualized 309), revenue per unique visitor $.014

They use a variety of processors. My overall poor ratios are due to the fact that I have traffic from a wide variety of sources and a lot of it is non-niche adult traffic that gets fed in without a lot of filtering.

I got nothing to add to the eternal argument about the why, but the "what" seems beyond dispute. And this has been a terrible, terrible month. I'm even seeing JuicyAd sales go to shit, zones that were selling happily at .02-.04 per click aren't selling even when I price them at .009 a click. That tells me that *nobody* is converting anything; if they were, they'd be buying those one cent clicks and making bank.

(One of the big reasons I believe in selling brokered ad spots is that I'm more a traffic guy than a sales guy. When the sales wizards tell me I'm doing it wrong, I know they're probably right. So I'm happy to sell the clicks and let some other fool try to do it better. I learn a lot about who's making bank that way, and doing what. Right now, nobody seems to have an angle that works.)

I guess a program owner should know that some processors BATCH process delayed sales at once sometimes. I mean, I'm an affiliate and I noticed this long ago, can't believe that program owners don't realize this at all.

Again, if your monthly sales remain the same, then you are fine.

If your monthly sales are down, then, yes, having access to a complete members area in HD with 2 clicks from google and FOR FREE, is affecting your business. MAN, even a 8 year old guy can access a complete MEMBERS AREA with two clicks from google, and WITH NO CREDIT CARD at all now.. Can't believe nobody cares..

Getting 50 sales 1 day, then 2 sales the following day and again 50 sales the third says nothing to me... other then BATCH process of delayed sales.

Fair use :winkwink:

aghhrrr do you have to repeat this over and over again? Everyone knows porn is available free for everyone, but in this particular case it's not the cause. Banks declining purchases, that's what it is

I got his reply from CCBill :

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

We have been watching that thread and I have been personally talking to many of the posters in that thread however there are a couple of reasons that I have not posted and the main being that we cannot find any issues with our system and people like yourself do not want to hear that ?everything is fine?.

I have copied our analysts on this email so they can take a look at your account and see if we notice any problems at all.

Currently we are unaware of any issues with our systems however we are carefully looking over all of them as we speak and are always monitoring and making steps to accept as many transactions as possible. Please remember, when we do not accept sales we do not make money either so it is in our best interest to make sure everything is on the up and up always. That being said we also look at our statistics over the years and compare certain months and honestly we see usual drops in volume this time of year as well, while such fluctuations may seem abnormal we see do see them all of the time.



We will be in touch.

/////////////////////////////////////////////


Yesterday, and for the 3rd week in a row, sales are shitty. 20 sales one day, 3 for the 3 next days. Then 15, then 4.

Always same traffic. Before, sales were coming in smoothly everyday.

Something is going on, I don't know what exactly but I have enough.

I am switching to another processor today.

This year I am 1:4200 with kink.com. 2009 I was 1:1300 with them. A lot of that is niche traffic which is still selling well with ccbill sponsors. It makes me sad because I've always liked kinkydollars. This is the first year that I've seen things this bad with them. Rebills have also fallen off a cliff. Unfortunately it looks like they are turning into another Pimproll (1:6,000+) for me. :( Conversion rates tripling over the course of a year means no more promotion from me. And if it keeps up I will remove all links. :(

My other main sponsors aren't doing bad. With a few my conversions are somehow better than ever. :upsidedow

ratios are seriously bad. Good thing mainstream is still doing quite well

mainstream going very well

Yeah, I don't quite understand what happened with them. I did notice a huge drop in quality of their product right after they had that big round of layoffs -- especially in the lighting of their shoots, which got very dim and murky. But my relationship with them goes back a lot of years and they've always been a good converter and a solid pay. I expected them -- of all people -- to surf these hard times better than they have.

By the way it's not just CCbill that seems to do some batch processing. I woke up this morning to find five kinkydollars sales that got processed between between midnight and 7:00 AM. On June 1. I didn't have a single five-sale day with them in May, so they or their processors *must* have been sitting on those sales and waiting to run them (re-run them?) in June.

1st: Switching to another processor may or may not help you. I've seen these patterns with Epoch, too, tho the patterns do seem to be a little differant than CCBill (differant merchant accounts maybe?).

2nd: CCBill's response was poorly written so I never 'trust' anyone who can't spell correktly. LOL Just kidding - but the 'everything is fine' and 'we make money when we put-through and don't when we don't' arguments would hold more water if the stats from various webmasters didn't 'match up' almost perfectly. In other words, within a day or so of each other EVERYONE had a 'bad day' on such-and-such a date, then EVERYONE had a 'good day' on such-and-such a date. This tells me that SOMEthing is going on here. And it may, in fact, NOT be with CCBIll (or Epoch et al). It MAY be Visa or the banks putting a clampdown on.

Anyway, when I see 20+ sales one day, then 3 the next, then 20+, then 2, SOMEthing is wrong here. Please don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. LOL

Oh - and Summer's "officially" here! What does THAT mean then? :)

Yesterday June 1 I had another strange thing going on. Between 6 AM - 8 AM GMT (that is about between midnight - 2 AM US time) I had one after the other sign up coming in from several programs (both CCBILL and other processors).
I said: "all problems are gone..., we are on track again..."

After that: almost no sign up anymore (only some NATS sales).
So the 1st day of June really was poor for me...

I really don't get it.
My traffic is steady...

---
May 2010: Summary:
May 1 - May 15: Very very good with lots of sales...
May 16: Little slow down...
May 17 - May 25: Almost complete cut of CCBILL sales (about -80% CCBILL)
May 26 - May 31: Again better (70% of normal CCBILL sales)

Conclusion for the month: I had a drop of -20% in revenue (i.c. April 2010) with about 200.000 raw hits more (i.c. April 2010)...

Yesterday was the slowest day I have had in the last 13 years in this industry.

I have signed up with Zombaio. I don't like their installation system : They deleted my htaccess file and my htpasswd file !!

Luckily, I made a backup before clicking on : test.


Let's see if all this is CCBill's fault.

I think it's not CCBILL's fault but it has something to do with the processing company that they are using. It appears users of Epoch and ? are suffering too.
On the other hand my stats are NOW much better than in the timeframe May 17 - May 25. However I do promote 50% CCBILL sites now and before that it was +75% or even +80%.


Keep us updated if you see a difference once your Zombaio system is working.

Today I woke up just to see 0:5800 conversions and -78$ chargeback :( Not the best thing to start a day

That is pretty frustrating to start the weekend with such results.
I see a whole lot of rebills (both NATS and CCBILL) but very slow new sales...

Yep, I like I said before in this thread, for some reason processors are using the BATCH PROCESS of delayed sales method/feature now more often.

That's why some people complain and say: "How can I get 1 day with 50 sales and the following day with 2 sales?"...

You can also try test signups if they allow you to do that.

Again, you need to take into consideration the whole month. Are your sales from May 2010 lower than May 2009? Then yes, the business has been affected by many external factors like Free content, Free content and also... Free content.

Did I meantion Free content as well?

CCBILL is not guilty. EPOCH neither... Well, EPOCH can be guilty for something and is keep processing sponsors THAT DO NOT PAY. But not for their processing IMHO.

When things are bad, they are bad.
When things are good, they are good.

Today sales on CCBILL are really rockin'... One after the other signup coming in... it is like there are no limitations anymore...
I have limited my traffic to CCBIIL sites the last weeks but despite that I have TOP sales now.

Same here.

It has nothing to do with batch processing.
I am still testing my new processor. I'll keep you posted.

i've had a ridiculous amount of rebills from one of my main sponsors this weekend (not a solely CCBill one) and other sponsors are doing normal or a little above average.

i don't know what it is (batching or whatever) but the only constant between all these programs is the fact that they accept credit cards so the answer lies with the actual CC companies imho

i wish someone 'in the know' would chime in with some insight

Conclusion at the end of this day:
On Sunday June 6 I have made more CCBILL sales than last week in a whole week...
My traffic was just on average so I did NOT do anything extra.
Also a whole lot of CCBILL rebills...
Really NO LIMITS...

NATS sales are on average but the CCBILL sales are just exceptional...

Let's hope it stays this way for the whole week... I mean... whole month or no better .... whole year to come...

Exactly the same here ! It is not normal


I don't like these up and down...

I don't like the downs either but I surely like the ups...
Anyway I don't think it's normal. If more webmasters see the same pattern there must be somebody at the controls who can manipulate porn surfers to all buy memberships arround the same time... That's just too crazy to think of...