Bingo cj. Can you imagine what would happen if this was open to everyone and their dog? It could very well turn into a nightmare. All the foreign spammers with their rape tours would be filling our inboxes with babenet stuff.

I, myself, considered this a good "temporary" idea for starting a couple paysites with cheap overhead with the intent of changing to your own members area once a good amount of money was accumulated. The problem with that is your affiliates would have to change all their codes. Then again, it could still work if your operation was "controlled". We all know a program can survive with a handful of good traffic senders vs. hundreds of smaller webmasters anyway.

The program owner is in a killer position with not only control over the designs of their sites, their own consoles, AND correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe they can keep the email list that is gathered. :inlove: God I love emails.

Anyway, it IS very important to know exactly who is following this model so we don't end up unintentionally put all our eggs in one basket. The joins we have accumulated through babenet backend sites have been better than the programs without. So, it's very important to pay close attention "just in case" something happens.

I'm shocked that no one is mentioning the other company/companies that are doing this same thing. Everyone keeps talking about ARS but that isn't the same because they are not letting their webmasters run entire affiliate programs, just individual sites.

You know, for some reason this reminds me of being on the Netpond newbie board when I started out and the big thing was to mass produce as many free sites, avs, and tgps all pointing to the same program. Now I guess mass producing front ends with little thought or care for what happens after the sale is the "thing to do".

I'm not necessarily for or against. Just intrigued

But don't the CC companies make money each time there's a transaction? So if there are 10,000 fraudulent transaction, they make fees. Then they make fees on the chargebacks. Then they get to charge 29% interest and say it's because the fraud rates are so high, when in reality, in most cases, they aren't out a dime - the merchant is. They have no real incentive to stop fraud, do they?

Jim,

I have also thought of game theory and it's application to ethical decisions adult companies contemplate. I should probably keep my conclusions to myself. The risk is too high.

The deal on game theory for anyone interested. Game theory is just what it sounds like. The
theory of how games are played. Most of the classical interest in game theory has revolved
around two party zero sum games.

* Two party zero sum games have two participants

* Zero sum means that the sum of the reward or penalties is always constant (years in
prison, money, whatever). Example, two people play a game and $100 is divided between them depending on how they play the game.

The "Nash Equilibrium" occurs when both parties have made a decision such that if either of
them changes their strategy and the other doesn't, they end up worse off than they
were before. It was authored by John Nash, the mathematician from the movie "A Beautiful Mind".

Game theory has been used to analyze political strategies such as whether one should defect
from a treaty or uphold it. Is it better to make an arms agreement with a rival nation and illegally break it or hold to it hoping the other nation does too?

Game theory was used during World War II in the consideration of Japanese bombing targets. Should one always bomb the best targets or will that lead to increased defense of those targets? I believe the answer was a mixed strategy. Sometimes you bomb the best ones, sometimes not. Often in life, according to game theory, the best answer is a mixed strategy.

In football for example, passing attempts yield more yards than rushing attempts however a mixed strategy is usually better and one reason is that if the defense knows you will pass every down, that nice high yards per pass attempt will head straight down. There are exceptions of course.

It's really interesting to consider the glut of free content with game theory in mind. Is it
worth it for TGP owners to saturate the market in order to make meager profits themselves if
it decreases the overall sales in the entire market?

Colin, this question would be good if the TGP owner had something to lose to start with - they don't. They start with no income, move up to some income, they are better off than when they started. From their solitary point of view, things went from worse to better.

The people paying the price are not related to the ones making the new income, so there is no feedback circle to stop the negative results. Program owners know that if they start to turn down TGP traffic (not even sure how they could), someone else will take it and they will lose MORE sales as a result.

The one thing I have learned in this business is that there is always someone willing to work on an even smaller margin. It's stunning, sometimes.

Alex

Unfortunately, most people can't comprehend game theory (I barely grasped it when I read the book, I'd imagine there are only a handful of folks here that do understand it completely), and even fewer bother to contemplate the consequences of their business strategies. The "me first and only me" rationale that seems to be prevalent in this industry does indeed seem to be bound to destroy us all.

I remember many of us causing an uproar several years ago when TGP's first emerged, saying that it would decrease paysite sales and affect the entire industry. It seems to have come to pass because I don't believe that it's only the world economy that has caused the virtual downfall of online porn.

The glut of free content and broadband access has made it far less attractive to the surfer to pay for porn. I've heard this from many more men recently in the real world. They have access to almost all the content found in paysites for free, video is readily available and what's not on TGP's is on napster-style sites.

Hosted galleries following the free content and hosting that all sponsors now have to offer to be able to compete with the large companies are only adding to this problem. It's gotten to the point where any John Doe from Bodunk can open his own porn business because there is virtually no investment on his part, so the more people that enter the business part-time to make 100 extra bucks a month, the smaller the piece of the pie becomes. No one even has to have the basic knowledge of html, graphics or design, it's all done for them now.

Add that to there being enough bad paysites out there to burn out the paying surfer and most of us are in trouble. The few that are making money now don't think about the future, but it's been that way since the beginning of this industry.

The vast majority of people in the adult biz had no prior business education or experience, so trying to explain any of this to them is like banging your head against a brick wall, very few will listen or care. They're here to grab what they can and refuse to envision what appears to be the rapid demise of the industry as a whole.

Ok, lol, Alex was posting at the same time I was and managed to say it all in a lot fewer words..I should just edit my post to say, "yeah, what he said!" :D

:rokk: sista!

"Take this job and shove it.... " hehe

BTW Heather, we had "the talk" and it went very good :) You'll hear something really soon.

It's STILL a good question. In fact it is still THE question. It's not a question of whether they are better off than before but rather whether they are better off than they would have been. Isn't that THE question we are considering and not the one you are suggesting? We all know companies that defected from the standards and rules most of us adhere to do better in the short-run and some of them even did better than they ever would have by not defecting.

Without the free content glut, a TGP webmaster may have put effort into another free site endeavor with little start up capital, taken more time to get going but eventually made more money. Maybe without TGPs, it takes twice as long to make the same money in other free site projects but then it runs ahead.

The answer as to what is better may be either but it's still a fantastically interesting question, both specifically and in general.

The question is not which path is better. The question is which path is best.




Last edited by Colin at Feb 14 2003, 03:09 PM

The problem is that there are very few willing to consider the question, even if they could understsand it in the first place. B)

Does anybody know if overall revenues from Net porn have declined this year to last, last year to the year before? Or did it plateau? Or................is Net porn revenue still growing somewhat but the pie is being nibbled on by more webmasters and programs so that everybody is seeing drop in business even tho biz might still be growing?

CCBill, IBill and Epoch know the answer. Only they can know for sure. They have the historical data and between them probably process 80% of all porn transactions.

Sorry but little to add to this as it really has all been said above. I really just wanted to say wow - one of the only (the only?) educated discussions I've seen and most of the posts with a very good understanding of the causes of delining sales and true impact of free porn.

Most of us act locally. What happens globally is the sum.

Porn as an industry is so unique. It's not like we can ask anyone to bail us out if the evolution of the industry is such that it ends up a dodo bird. - as happened to the airline industry for example.

Laissez faire is pure evolution. Sometimes it produces evolutionary hiccups.

Finally - a chance to get a word in - this thread has been zooming along like a rocket :)

It's really refreshing for someone to come out and say what a lot of us knew - most parts of the adult industry are struggling. Apart from the free aspect this industry has to be feeling the effects of the world economic downturn simply because it is a business like any other and there is no reason why general economic principles would not apply.

Interestingly not all parts of the industry are in the doldrums, some small paysite operators that I talk to are still doing very well because they provide exclusive content for their members areas.

Perhaps that is why the 'reality' sites are also reporting good sales - not so much because of the 'reality' aspect but because their content is exclusive.

Whatever you heard, then I´m sure that some other payment system(s) could sell as good if not better than visa/mc. If just the processors would start to spread more of the risk by getting more local/national payment options, then we could see visa/mc drop from 80-90% of most websites transactions to prehaps 30-50% (if not even lower) - without loosing income!

Programs using Babenet are ok in my book - aslong as they do not try to hide the fact that they are "resellers"... The setup sounds really like how the dialer companies build their affiliate model - it allowed them for fast growth, however it ended with everyone having their own dialer program, and when some of the dialer networks closed, then alot of the dialer program owners were missing payments, and either had to pay out of their own pocket to their affiliates or close their programs/sites/companies...

As for the Babenet sites/tours price model - well I guess they know what they are doing, and if VISA/MC didn´t like or know about the model, then I´m sure they will eventually (that is, if there is a problem).

There will be even more free content in the future - there is only 1 way to stop it... politics/goverments, but thats probably not going to happen within the near future...

However I think its a matter of who controls the free content, not that its there. If people who control the free content is doing it to make big $, then it will be good for all B)

If it will be people who gets more excited when their counter rank rise, then when they receive an extra digit on their paycheck - well then it will not be pretty in the long run.

I wish that every paysite owner and every tgp owner could switch roles for just 1 day... then paysite owners would see how much free content matters, when getting traffic/bookmarks, and tgp owners would see the costs of having a paysite.... they might end up understanding eachother, and finding ways where they both will benefit :stout:

Colin, the problem is that this question cannot be answered - because everyone else suffers as the result of a poorer choice by any one person in the group. Like electricity, surfers tend to flow through the path of least resistance... and membership is a remarkably large resistor.

The first Picpost and the first TGP basically closed out certain options in the game. TGP2 was an attempt to reverse that, but even that suffers in the face of the poorer choice that is TGP.

Now the question is "faced with the current circumstances, what is the best path from here?".

Alex

Rolo, in a past life, I use to do rental car yield management - the process of pricing available cars for maximal revenue and utilization of resources.

One of the simpliest (and stupidest) ways to assure full utilization of cars was the "cheapest in the market". Basically, a certain percentage of potential customers will rent from whoever has the lowest price, all other things being equal. The cars are the same, the locations are the same, the service is the same - price is the point of difference. Being cheap gets you more clients.

However, those more clients don't make you the most money - and more importantly, if you are playing against other people in the same situation (and you always are) you often end up in price wars that lower the actual TOTAL market revenue and don't grow either company's business.

Free content, free galleries, free all that stuff is basically the same product. "If I give enough stuff away, people will come to my site and MAYBE buy something". We have passed from 1 in 100 to 1 in 400 to 1 in 1000 to 1 in I don't even want to think about it. This has all happened in the battle to have "the most for the least".

General "porn" is almost dead on the net as a result.

With too many programs willing to give away the store to get clients in the door, the free galleries / content / movie clips / etc won't stop. But the economics of the situation are shifting quickly, and this whole industry is due to shift gears VERY soon.

Link sites I operate have seen more than 10% of all listings go 404 or no host in the last 30 days. There are larger numbers of free site webmasters who just can't afford to pay to renew domains, can't afford to pay for hosting, and are disappearing. I ran the link bot 3 days ago, I suspect I can run it again today and find another 1-2% gone in that time frame.

The end of "as it was" started about 6 months ago... and it won't be long now. :unsure:

But there are sunnier days on the other side, where new choices can be made, less players will be around, and the same money will be spread to less people.

Alex

Colin, isn't the idea of the Nash Equilibrium when applied to economics, that unlike the old "do what you do for yourself" model and it will help the marketplace ... that it is replaced by "do what you do for yourself AND for others" turns out to be best for everyone in the marketplace?

The BabeNet thing sounds like it could be a bad thing if it is mishandled. I know the the YNP model from PMB has it so that if someone joins from PMB and later from someone's YNP (or visa versa) the programming catches it and the member gets an automatic refund keeping chargebacks down. (At least that's the way I recall Bill explaining it to me three years back.) So if Babenet does similiarly, it might not be bad at least in THAT respect. However ....

If I'm sending traffic to what I think is five different sites, and they are only five different front ends, I am wasting my traffic and putting too much into the same basket. Worse, as Mike says, I might not even know it is the same basket, and that truely does suck!

I hope that you are right :)

But I also think that we must not forget that free needs pay, as much as pay needs free... the problem we have today is that the free content is more widespread then pay content on tgps... the balance is out of order, when you can get more XXX content free at TGPs than at the paysites promted on the same TGPs.

However if we can get more "free" controlled by business people, then we will start to see changes in both the amount of free XXX content outside pay areas, and the amount of promotion for paysites at TGPs etc.

If free tgp galleries submiters are going out of business to be replaced by hosted galleries, then I think we are headed in the right direction, because tgp owners will start to ask themself questions like "how can I convert better etc.", and hosted galleries will try to sell more, and it will be accepted by the tgp owners.

In any economy where the saturation point is reached, I think it's safe to say that cannibalism will arise. I think we've come to that point in this industry and this year we'll start to see a shrinkage in the number of players on all levels...

how is that wasting traffic?
what if one tour or front end didn't "do it" for the surfer? If you're bring paid a flat fee per signup, why would you care? The burden is then upon the program owner...if you were on a partnership, then of course retention would be lower and you'd run into more problems...

It comes to down to the paysite owners (or babenet) providing top notch quality service to avoid problems with dupes...for example, with DarkDollars, we have a lot of the same content in each site, but it's re-arranged differently depending upon the site the surfer enters (so whatever it was that sparked his/her interest is the first thing they see). That's not to say we're going to buy 500 cheerleader pics and say "tada, we have a cheerleader site" ;) If we ffind a duplicate customer, we do this crazy whacky thing called "provide customer service" and resolve any problems. We're constantly getting emails and ICQ's from customers and we actyually pay attention. Maybe this is why our retentions are better than average? Hell, when we had the big content database crash and lost 90% of our content, we kept our members informed and offered refunds and they stuck with us.

Whats all this bitching about duplicate customers? If you've got multiple sites that at least have a good percentage of content that's not all the same, then why would you not want duplicates? It's much easier to sell someone something else than to find someone new to buy...

And I don't know how the Lifetimebucks backends are set up and unless someone can definitively say they are all the same then how do we know?

KK's right. I'd much rather bitch about black boots in her hallway. :nyanya:

At least you know they ain't lonely, living amoungst so many other shoes and boots... it's almost like a boot nature reserve... :nyanya:

But don't the CC companies make money each time there's a transaction? So if there are 10,000 fraudulent transaction, they make fees. Then they make fees on the chargebacks. Then they get to charge 29% interest and say it's because the fraud rates are so high, when in reality, in most cases, they aren't out a dime - the merchant is. They have no real incentive to stop fraud, do they?[/b][/quote]
Peaches, this is not the case ...

Visa's VALID argument for the past 18 months or so has been that the adult industry (and recurring industry's in general) produce the most amount of chargebacks and administration work for Visa. Until visa introduced their 2% rule (where ALL merchant accounts must stay below 2% chargebacks), it was a free for all with visa covering the admin expenses at the end.

After the 2% rule, visa introduced chargeback fines, to cover the cost of the customer support. $100 per chargeback ...

Visa's latest rules include 1% chargebacks, verified by visa and BIG MOTHER FUCKING FINES (right ibill?) ... and i'm sure a host of other rules will come into effect.

Visa has NOT been making a profit off the fees - that's the problem!! If they were, we wouldn't still be getting new rules on a daily basis.

The most important thing to remember when we doubt visa's next move is that the credit card holder is the customer to visa - NOT US. Visa cares so much about their customers that they will support them at OUR expense .... "Why certainly sir, i'll reverse this naughty porn charge that you couldn't possibly have made"

Now if the 3rd party processors like ibill, ccbill, epoch etc actually bothered to fight the chargebacks with the REAL INFORMATION they gather, we might not have gotten here in the first place.

I gather enough information to prove fraud against many surfers who chargeback, WHY THE FUCK DOES NOBODY WANT TO SEE IT!??!?!?

Colin & DJ & Alex, excellent posts & discussion. thank you.


that's the whole point KK, the sites don't have different content ... why would the program owner want to pay for the same member multiple times to the same backend? great for the webmaster, doesn't make a lot of sense for the program owner. and there is not going to be ANY recurrings if someone signs up for 5 sites, and if there is, it will definately become a chargeback of 5 X $39.95 after a payout of 5 x $45!!

Oh yeah, and I just got spammed:

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.xxxdirectsex.net/apie">100% FREE PORN
CLICK HERE NOW!</a>


Gotta love it... sure enough, free + a big charge on page two, after they have your name and info (or in this case, Serge's name and email... :-)

Alex

K let me address these to my way of thinking - -which is not wrong nor right, simply my thoughts.

We've had 1% CTC in Visa US well more than a year. We had 2.5 on foreign merch accts for a while but that went away more than a year ago too unless my memory is way foggy.

Visa is not so much concerned with making or losing money on chargebacks as they are concerned with the brand image. The actual % of business that high risk -- not just adult but all high risk -- comprises is negligable to Visa BUT NOT TO THE ACQUIRING BANKS -- Visa is also made up of different groups of banks who are concerned with the amount of money they lose on sheisters that move their own DB's from one bank to another, burning everything in their path like setting a wildfire. At the end of the day, the banks that don't even do high risk suffer from certain high risk client actions. I will not name names here but the clue is a certain ISO under a federal RICO indictment on the west coast... how could that have happened if the gov't did not perceive some intent to defraud all the way down the oh so rosy path???

Why should ISPS's bother disputing chargebacks under the current structure? Site owners do not want to bear the cost and the cost is much more than the admin fee for getting the chargeback the way the system stands right now. If you don't think so, lets take a poll and see how many site owners -- ESPECIALLY the ones processing with companies that do not assess the admin fee to them -- are willing to spend 20 bucks to fight a chargeback with no guarantee of a win -- and given that taking the cb if they do not fight and do get passed the fines is around 15 bucks in most cases -- who's going to do it? Smart money is on not bothering, thus the reason that some of the people with their own merch accts dont bother fighting, they just take the admin assessments and the fines and move on...

Last but not least, are you saying that all the Babenet sites backends are the same or no? I don't know, I havent bothered to look since I don't run a front end for it... if they are the same then Rob and Jack are the ones with the issues, and should be stopping multiple joins from the same surfer if they dont want to deal with the customer service, but if they are not identical then perhaps they'd rather do multiple sales... not my business so I don't know what they are thinking.

Obviously they are doing something to make it work, or else the rest of these people wouldn't be using it...

When are you headed this way again cj, I miss seeing you!

Interesting discussion, but why are we shying away from what is likely the real issue... not that multiple people are promoting the same back end... but rather the fact that they push

100% TOTALLY FOREVER REALLY I SWEAR TO GOSH FREE! NOT KINDA FREE, BUT REALLY HONESTLY I SWEAR FREE FREE FREE WITH NO OBLIGATION!

ok. not really free. you have to give us 40 bucks for the above free membership

Now i'm not necessarily saying i think it's wrong... Buttttt... that is what this discussion was originally about and i'm interested in your opinion about the billing mechanism.

No way Hoop, the discussion was not about free or not free but about whether Babenet was the next Amway or not.

I don't trust these guys as far as I can throw them... and I don't throw too far.

... and celeb sites.

I have to assume this isn't being processed in the US.

Alex

how is that wasting traffic?
what if one tour or front end didn't "do it" for the surfer? If you're bring paid a flat fee per signup, why would you care? The burden is then upon the program owner...if you were on a partnership, then of course retention would be lower and you'd run into more problems...[/b][/quote]
Hello? Sykk? Because you might have noticed, not only do conversion rates to various sites and programs go up and down but often a processor suddenly scrubs harder than another. In these cases you want as a paysite owner multiple processors. As someone sending traffic you want to send traffic to different programs and to different programs using multiple processors, so if one suddenly goes down, you send it them less now, and send more traffic to the others doing better.

Now what if then you think you have your traffic set up this way, but lo and behold, it turns out the 10 places you're sending it to is in reality are all the ONE SAME PLACE, and it suddenly the conversions goes to hell or the scrub is turned up to grindstone. Yep, you're screwed is what!! THAT is what I mean by wasting traffic, my friend.

Ah, thank you CJ! You have my very answer for KK.

Kimmy, I think you need to take a recent look at some paysite interiors. The rule of thumb is: join one paysite, get 99 others for free. And each of these "paysites" have 2-5,000 pics in a niche, and then every one of them goes to the same "mega area" consisting of the same 100 plugins. End of story. That, today, is your average "paysite": basically 90 AVS gold sites connected thru 90 corridors. all leading to the identical mega plugin links page. Tell me how you are going to hold duplicate customers to that and not have chargeback city?

This sort of explains low rention rates, no? You sell someone a latina site, and it has a couple of thousand pics and a few videos, and that's it... the rest is "general porn" or other non-related niches.

Burn though the couple of thousand pics (maybe 2 visits) and there is no great reason for a niche lover to stay a member, from what I can tell. Does this not also dilute the market and discourage future purchases?

Worse, let's say 5 people are promoting the same content from the same company, with 5 different front ends. Guy buys one, stays a member a month, quits. Tries to find something new, join what he thinks is another site, only to end up back in the SAME niche gallery to the same mega area...

I don't picture him (1) staying a member too long, and (2) being that interested in trying again - his entire view of the net will be "one big scam".

Alex

this depends on the site owner or merchant account owner.
a dollar saved is a dollar earned
<_<

aiming for phoenix forum, or definately august internext in florida ;-)

Sorry Dravyk, but given the fact that most everyone buys from the same content producers, same plug in people and the same feed companies, basically ALL paysites are the same and surfers should never join more than one, by your reckoning.

If thats the case we can all give up now...

cj- seeing you at the Forum would be awesome!!!



Last edited by *KK* at Feb 15 2003, 04:19 AM

Alex isn't talking about MY latina site :P

Ok, I saw the opportunity for a shameless plug, I took it!

And just to stay on topic, if sites with cascading processing don't have a way of weeding out multiple joins by the same surfer, they are begging for chargebacks.

We precap information before the surfer even hits the processor (all but the cc#), that's how we catch multiple trial offenders as well. They are sent to a page that tells them that they've already had a trial to this site and are given an opportunity to join for a full membership at a slightly reduced rate.

The precap catches almost 100% of my trial abusers, and I have a ton of them! Since it's a special subid for my site, I can see just how many of them I get a week and it's a healthy percentage! Of course, I am getting these not because I have multiple front ends, but because a goodly percentage of my former members come back for more. I'd guess that about 60% of my current members have joined at least once before, some as many as 10 times.

I've considered offering reduced rates when a user decides to cancel, but haven't done it yet since the odds are high that the guy will be back anyway, that's why it's good to have a members area that's constantly updated and has a shitload of content.

Since the piece of the pie is down to a sliver, the only way I can stay in business is by retaining members and luring former members back.

and if they are... then I wouldn't mind seeing Mike's list of which programs are babenet resellers.

if a CC number has been used to signup at piecash.. and babenet wont take it again... Then I don't really want to be mixing up sites from more than one of their reseller programs!

On the other hand... this thread does make it sounds like Babenet do have their processing sorted! Might not be a bad idea to try sending to one of them :yowsa:

Heather, your type of latina site night and day different from the latina sites offered by most mega programs, and I sort of posted that to see if you would enjoy the chance to mention it. Sadly, there is no real easy way for a surfer to tell the difference from the outside...

Funny, this is exactly like the video porn business - most of the money appears to be spent on the BOX, not on the content... which I feel might be a "one time" sales job rather than a relationship builder.

Alex

I can't believe you guys just got hip to the Babenet thing..........

I know most of the companies in question- they do unreal numbers with their current situation.
I am just waiting , very much like the SPAM issue was suppose to break the camels back- to see who starts sending traffic to babenet .............

As I know plenty of people in this bsuiness who fear what they don't understand,
then they themsleves TRY it.

I am not saying I send to babenet or that the model is right or wrong...

I am just saying whn one makes money in this biz...it becomes a monkey- see monkey do scenario.

Truth be told BABENET is getting some great promotion out of this thread...IMHO.

Just my 2 cents :-))

A general statement about any thread that goes beyond two posts. When we start discussing questions that are answerable everyone will leave. Both of us included.