I've worked for babenet. In 99 they were fined over a million bucks by visa for their bad business ways. Never updated anything, sold live feeds that were not always live. Customer service guys that acted like the jerky boys.

Can't say much more but after working for them I would never, ever do business with them. All they do is bait and switch.

Pretty funny, no doubt they are still trying to upsell their "live" recorded feeds from 98 up in those sites and paying fat guys to chat.

edit- not sure if my user name conflicts with someone elses... it was not my intention to do so.



Last edited by ollyperv at Feb 11 2003, 10:17 AM

ollyperv thanks for the post.

This is the same experiences I have had with babenet as well. I am amazed they are still in businenss.

If you have any more info, would love to hear about it.

Shann, Greg, can you guys explain how the babenet thing works?

Is there a place online I can read about it, find out information to see if this is something I would want to set up?

I am curious how they handle payouts to their resellers? Do they send money to piecahs and piecash pays webmasters out? Or does babenet issues checks to webmasters in Piecash's name?

How does chargebacks work?

How do you determine what to pay out? Does babenet payout more based on number of signups?

What about count? Who handles the count of clicks and such? Is it you, or babenet?

Please excuse my ignorance, I am new to this and trying to get my head straight.

I have and always have had a SERIOUS problem with any company that uses multiple front ends for a single member's area.

I had a huge fight with someone from a very large company (that shall remain unnamed now) back in 2000 for running 17 different tours, with all different niches, for one back end.

It is tantamount to fraud in my opinion and tons of companies do it. It's just not right to mislead the surfer in that manner.

If you're advertising a pregnant site, the site should have nothing but pregnant content in it, latin should have latin, ebony ebony, etc. I also object strongly to filler.

It just irks me to no end to see my huge competitors claim that they have 100K pics and a million videos in their latina site, but in reality the latin section contains maybe 10K latin pics and one latin video plugin, the rest is filler from their other sites. And we all wonder why the surfers have become gunshy.

In the redesigns of my site, I've even kept basically the same color scheme in my tours because I don't want surfers joining thinking that they've never belonged to the site before.

I have no problem with multiple tours, as long as they all use the same site name. I plan to have more than one tour now, and I may even change the color scheme on the next one, but it's still going to say Latina Pics all over it.

I get tons of rejoins to my site, but it's not because the guy doesn't remember he ever joined, he comes back because he liked the site. I've had some guys join 10 times over the last 4 years, but they knew what site they were joining. If a reseller of my site wants to build their own tour..fine, as long as they brand it clearly with my site name. Otherwise, it's deceptive advertising. In the real world, the FTC would shut that shit down in a heartbeat.

There is no valid reason to put different site names on tours leading to the same backend. I guess this falls under Nick's famous line, "we only have the morals we can afford", but in the end, it's still a scam.

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.p...threadid=106761

sneaker
My posts are basically a brain dump

Registered: Dec 2002
Location:
Posts: 75
Better hope Visa doesn't find out you guys are "sharing a merchant account" when they drop the hammer it hurts. And remember MLM scams are prosecutable.

Heather,

Come on now.... You consider it fraud if a paysite over delivers on it's promises? That's a little extreme.

Providing a great site with a lot of extra content SOME surfers might look at will only increase retention. Do you really think it's fraudulent? As long as the site delivers what the tour says it does for the price the tour says and everything is disclosed properly, I don't see how that's fraud.

KC,

You didn't read what I wrote. I object to sites claiming that they have X number of a certain kind of content when they're counting their filler in the total number.

SOME surfers might look at that other content and if you have a generic site, great, no problem, but if you're advertising a niche, you should tell the surfer on the outside the truth about how much of that niche content you have.

A general site can say they have 200K pics of whatever, it doesn't matter, but it's still misleading for anyone with a niche tour to either claim or insinuate that they have more content of that specific niche than they do.

We all know that there is no preggo, latin, foot or whatever fairly specific niche site that has a million videos of that niche.

Look at the tours of a lot of the niche sites out there..they are misleading at the least, downright fraudulent at the worst.

Sorry, I somehow missed that line when I read it the first time.. I would agree that it could be misleading..

There are a lot of misleading things about this industry. I don't see them going away anytime soon either.

Sure you're new! lol

For info on www.piecash.com go there and click on Program Details, that's always a good start. :)

Do you mean set up your own front ends with Babenet Mike AI? I think you would need to speak to them directly on that if you wanted to go that route.

Piecash pays out twice a month, 5 days after the pay period is over so we payout on the 5th and the 20th. The cheques come from us, Real World Media LLC. Not sure when Babenet pays us, doesn't seem relevant.

There are no chargebacks to the webmaster.

How do we determine what to pay out? Why we picked it out of a hat of course! lol It was predetermined before we launched our program. We payout $40, 1 joins a month or a day. Maybe more for larger amounts of sign ups, it's negotiable. That's our policy. Does babenet payout more based on the number of sign ups? I don't know, I don't work for babenet.

We have our own affiliate program, we track our clicks and joins it's all in our program.

Hope that answers all your questions! I'm going to the gym now, so if being attacked I'll be back in about 2 hours. :)

I'm also available if you'd like to talk directly on icq 52624206 or email me sales@piecash.com and even aim me trafficqueenxxx

Mwah!

Babenet is not the first to run backends for other people and they won't be the last. I'm not sure what the big deal is with their setup -- it's similar to an ARS BYOT, somewhat similar to an AVS -- after all, other people are building sites and the premise is that surfers get that site and more content -- a surfer that joins two platinum avs sites from the same vendor gets the same additional content with those avs memberships... I think PMB was one of the first doing a build your own tour type of setup, years ago...

Of course when other people have these types of ideas, and I've seen one really good one that is along the course of Babenet's, I venture to say people won't be bitching nearly so loud since it's someone else handling the backend. But at the end of the day its the same setup.

If you truly believe that ONE company can affect Visa that much, and that company is not an ISPS, you probably have too much time on your hands. If you don't like Babenet, that's fine, say so and go on about your business, but don't get on a soapbox about their business practices which are not so very different from many others.

I haven't paid much attention to their actual signup process, but Visa's got specific rules about what has to go where for the disclosure and Visa's also got a company out surfing adult web sites full time looking for violations -- so if there are that many people using this setup, do you not think that Visa is aware of it... not to mention Babenet's bank?

I am not seeing where this is an MLM either... it's my understanding that Babenet is paying the intermediary, ie Piecash (just using you as an example Shan) and then it's up to the intermediary to determine how much and when to pay the reseller. Babenet in no way guarantees what will be paid to resellers as far as amounts, dates, etc that I've seen in all this...

Just seems to be making a lot of ado about nothing really important.

The litmus test on the "fairness" of these billing procedures is if you can hold the merchant account and not blow up the bank with chargebacks...I think people in the know are familiar with the answer to this question...

Where is Colin when we need him?

Colin, please explain the "The Nash Equilibrium" better than I can...

Here is an example -

<span style='color:blue'>
The Prisoner's Dilemma

In Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, allied victory in World War II is a foregone conclusion, and Yossarian does not want to be among the last ones to die. His commanding officer points out, "But suppose everyone on our side felt that way?" Yossarian replies, "Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"

Every general reader has heard of the prisoner's dilemma. The police interrogate two suspects separately, and suggest to each that he or she should fink on the other and turn state's evidence. "If the other does not fink, then you can cut a good deal for yourself by giving evidence against the other; if the other finks and you hold out, the court will treat you especially harshly. Thus no matter what the other does, it is better for you to fink than not to fink -- finking is your uniformly best or 'dominant' strategy." This is the case whether the two are actually guilty, as in some episodes of NYPD Blue, or innocent, as in the film LA Confidential. Of course, when both fink, they both fare worse than they would have if both had held out; but that outcome, though jointly desirable for them, collapses in the face of their separate temptations to fink.

Yossarian's dilemma is just a multi-person version of this. His death is not going to make any significant difference to the prospects of victory, and he is personally better off alive than dead. So avoiding death is his dominant strategy. </span>

In essence...look out for numero uno. The Nash Equilibrium forces people to consider what other people are THINKING before making their choices also...ie, thinking about thinking...and if you are in an industry where you think numerous people are thinking we're on a runaway train towards the abyss, do you hop on the train to get what you can...or do you stand on the tracks watching as it runs you over...

I dunno....I just wonder how many people have saved for a rainy day..cuz it's starting to sprinkle... :)

No more of those strawberry margaritas at lunch for you Jim ;)

Someone who is well respected but does not want to put their name sent me this in ICQ, I guess they do not want to be put in the catagory troublemaker, like the rest of us!

I tend to agree, I do not understand how a reseller for Babenet can make enough money to pay out $40. What is babenet paying out per sale? $45 cannot be much more...

So the program would have to do a lot of work, have servers, tours, customer support people, all for $5 a signup or so? I am not buying it.

Of course there is money to be made in exit consoles, I am sure they control that... and probably where the real money is in this business model.

And Shann, while I am not new to the business, I am new to the MLM business model that babenet is running with....

I have been working hard past month, and will continue to for the future business model I want to move HiRise towards. My business model which I stumbled into in 1996 is not doing as well in todays enviroment, so I am looking around and seeing what I need to do to posistion my company to be around the next 5 years....

Like Jim said, it is starting to rain....

Mike Babenet has always had their own merchant accounts, i can't think of any other company doing the amount of dollars they do that has been able to do this, no idea how they keep them but i got an email from a video biz person who said Babenet is ......... hmmmmmmmmmmmm...........well let's just say they're well connected in many places. Meaning they have carte blanche to do whatever they want with somebody's credit card once they have it, a sign up is worth more to them than to a company that plays by most of the rules and has major costs.

Nobody seems to exactly know who Babenet is. I always thought it was owned by VCA, one of the largest adult video companies whose roots go way back, but there are more people involved in Babenet than Russ Hampshire who owns VCA. I don't think he probably has anything to do with Babenet's operations.

Also dont forget that Babenet pays nothing for content, what little they do have in the members areas is probably from VCA.

If you go into a Babenet members area take a look at which big boy gets the traffic. No customer is going to stay a member of that shithole website, there are ads lots of ads pushing them to other websites.

So your friend might be wrong, they might be paying out enough to these 'front' operators who are heavy heavy into spamming to be able to afford paying them $50 maybe even $60 per signup. So they can turn around and pay out $40 to their affilliates.

I am still trying to figure out where this is an MLM, Michael? I don't really see it as that intrinsically different than an AVS or another build your own tour type of set up. Of course the big difference is that they are paying the intermediary (PieCash, etc) who is then paying their own resellers, which is once again not the way an MLM works -- the parent company would have to be making the payouts to everyone, not paying the intermediary the entire amount and letting them pay their resellers...

I thought Slav mentioned they were paying out 40 bucks on a 40 buck join, well that isnt rocket science and is easily doable, especially in light of people who pay 35 bucks on a 4 dollar signup...

Obviously if Babenet is controlling the exit traffic and the rebills on joins, it's an entirely doable business model, and from the paying on joins perspective, it's a lot less risky than the traditional setup for both the backend and the intermediary providers.

Is everyone getting 40 dollars per join? Could it be that some are getting more than that? Or less than that? I think there are probably quite a few program owners who would be happy to take a flat 5 or 10 dollars per join and not have the hassle of dealing with member areas, retention, that sort of thing.

What it boils down to when I look at it is that the intermediaries are basically just brokering joins. Not a traditional method no, but they dont have the liability of the unproductive members or traffic on their heads or in their cash flow either...

I'm very curious now as to this whole thing.

I have done alot of email marketing for quite some time. And I send to whatever program that makes the most money, I send to http://www.sexpromote.com everyday , I make much more sending to my own sites then any other program I have ever tried. I have done test signups and guess what??? Every single one has been accounted for.
Another thing , believe me , there is alot of money to be made in this business model.

KK I do not know the details, so I am as confused as you are.

Does babenet control the exit or does the program?

I mention it as a MLM program because babenet does more then process for them, and provie authentication ( which is what an AVS does). It appears babenet provides the entire back end, the entire members area. So in essence you are selling babenet members access. There are more then one company doing it, and there seems to be levels... so that is how I come up with the MULTI - LEVEL MARKETING.

It could be a wonderful business model, I am just trying to understand it 100%. If I wanted to be a reseller for babenet, where would I go to find out the details? Who has the information?

come on Mike, if thats what you call an MLM anything could be considered an MLM

crossbilling would be an MLM
i dont really see any levels here but as Toolz said the set up is roughly the same as ARS BYOT. Would ARS be an MLM as well ?

By this thinking Your House Mortgage is an MLM. Your bank always sells your mortage to another bank.

I think you might be streching this a little.

KK, from what i've seen it doesnt apear that babenet is controling the exit traffic. Maybe GregP and Shan can confirm this.

From what i've seen all these guys seem to be doing biz with each other. They either share or trade exit traffic.

Maybe if I do a diagram it would be easier to understand how I am talking about this as a MLM.


BABENET
( (
piecash sexpromote etc. etc. etc.
{{{{ {{{{{{{ {{{ {{{ {{{
Webmasters Webmasters Webmasters

Sure this is not the same as some huge MLM programs, it still is MLM to me.

The issue is whose customer is the signup? If customer has complaint, or needs something who does he contact? Who is ultimiately responsible?

Also another big difference, as it appears to me, is that babenet is hiding behind these fronts. With the ARS product you must go to ARS to deal with the codes, and support and such. With this, there is no contact with babenet....

This can be seen in 2 ways... 1 babenet does not want to interfere with their resellers. Or 2 babenet is hiding behind their resellers because they have a bad name in the business and webmasters who have been burned by them, would not do business....

I dunno....I just wonder how many people have saved for a rainy day..cuz it's starting to sprinkle...
********************************

I was taking penis enlargement pills for rainy day...

I am ready for content photoshoots,
anybody knows a good and respectable fluffer?

http://www.sergenaked.com/6content2/serge2.jpg

We control all of our own exits.... Speaking of exits we have alot of joins to trade :D

Serge - You keep getting weirder and weirder.. don't ever change :wnw:

Wait til you see what the music business does to him ;)

what do you mean "weirder"???

You never seen nekkid men before????

Wait til you see what the music business does to him ;)[/b][/quote]
Sykk,
already did!

I had to take a day nap,
they tired me down!
;-)))

I dunno about weirder but he does look to be getting wider and wider...

Michael, if you have a point to make then come out and make it, you're starting to beat a dead horse with this MLM stuff.

I am sure you know where the Babenet site is, and if you wanted to talk to someone there you'd find a contact email on the site to use...

Hell if you get the exit traffic, *I* might have to look into this. It's been awhile since I've heard about it, so I'm sure it has streamlined and evolved.

By your definition you've made every AVS, ahem, into an MLM setup...

OMG I finally get to see Tony's tattooed dick, and yours too Serge.... though you win size wise, Tony wins for artistic merit! rofl

And we control our exits. And yes, we do exit trades, we send traffic to other programs, and when we mail other programs (some who have slammed us in this thread) guess what? We get more sign ups then they do.

Example: Send to ourselves, 75 joins, send to pay sites get 50 joins, send to someone who slammed us in this thread, get a total of 34 joins and wait over a month and still waiting for the recip traffic.

SO if anyone wants to talk trading traffic hit me up, it's much easier than getting distracted by looking at cocks! Hubba hubba!

Lol,

funny how everyone here that doesnt understand what's wrong with the babenet model of business, and who are comparing it to the ARS BYOT doesnt appear to have ever looked at a babenet signup form...

please do... come back and talk afterward...


That means you KK



Last edited by DrGuile at Feb 12 2003, 08:49 AM

Mike,
from babenet's perspective, this is a beneficial and safe move because

a) there are 20 programs contributing to the babenet member base of rebills. i know some of the webmasters who run these programs and the traffic volume's they are capable of. Babenet would be doing signups in the 4 figures per day using this system and at a rough rate of 30% staying first month and 30% staying 2nd month the volume will be enough to sustain a profit.

B) by giving a webmaster who can generate 200+ signups per day an affiliate program of their own, you guarantee their 200 signups are going to stay with you everyday plus a few referrals of the same size MINIMUM.

c) at no time is babenet allowing the affiliate program access to the areas of information that will bring babenet potential risk, such as processing. according to visa, visa has a deal with babenet and is responsible for all risks associated with the 20 'agents' running programs. therefore, you don't just let anybody run a program.

mutt, you are bitching about a different issue - the signup process with its upsells. THIS is what visa will have a problem with once the daily signups reach a point that creates the magic number of chargebacks for visa to say 'bye bye'.

in the case of piecash and any other program running on this system, the risk to them is obvious and the operators are staking their reputation on the success of the program.

it is not as dramatic as this thread has made it seem.

CJ I think you are right on the numbers... as always.

KK I really am not beating a dead horse, trying to find out the details. No one still has given them out. It seems like it is a quick easy way to build a program.

I was just curious how the dynamics work, guess I will have to contact Babenet and get the details.....

MikeAI, hit me up on ICQ when you have a few minutes...

Good Dr. I am on a new computer in Tampa....

my ICQ number here is 261986689

So sorry Guile, apparently sarcasm and ridicule went right over your head.

I don't see a problem with it. If people want to use this as their backend then you know what, it's a free country and they are welcome to do it.

Is it the be all end all to having a program? Probably not.

Is it going to put us all out of business singlehandedly? Hell no.

Is it any more 'liberal' in its' practices than about half the AVS out there? Ding ding ding, nope, it's not, unless things have changed drastically since I looked at it in August.

I don't see Babenet hiding anything, heck they openly approach and discuss with people on a regular basis... of course that's how they get clients for it...

theres a bunch of dirt on babenet in lukeford com subjects.





Last edited by ollyperv at Feb 12 2003, 11:49 PM

Mike, the important factor to success of a project like this is not allowing it to be an 'open application' where anyone can run a program. From my limited knowledge of their specifics, I believe that all program 'operators' have been hand selected up to a point.

I had an almost completed project like this for 6 months before i gave up trying to co-ordinate the number of elements needed to make this scale of project work. I can see the benefits to both babenet and the program operators ... the logistics are simple, provided you can always pay the program owners at least $5 - $10 per member more than they are paying their webmasters.

Personally, i'd like to be in the position of the program operators ... a guaranteed $5 - $15 per signup (depending on what you payout), with no risk of chargebacks, no members area costs, nothing but traffic and marketing. Being able to do what you do best for the most amount of money ... isn't that why we are here?

lets see what happens come april when visa launches PART II of LETS END THE ADULT INTERNET!


:P

If what I heard today is even remotely true, it's not going to take til April.

KK, what did you hear ?

I am amazed at the incopmetance of the people at VISA. How hard is it to crack down on frauds, and those who are abusing the system?

I could come up with a 5 step program that would eliminate a majority of the fraud from large programs and companies. VISA has absolute power on credit card processing, yet is as ignorant to the real problems.... and rather solving the real issues with a scapel, then would rather use a meat cleaver.

And CJ you are right, I have been looking around the babenet program and it appears it may be an invite only... which is good, at least they are not letting every twit in.... :o