[cj]

Originally posted by Mike AI@Jan 10 2003, 06:28 PM
Can they turn it around liek Epoch did? Maybe, but I doubt it. Epoch had a lot of personal interest in making sure they made it... where as IBill is a small part of some large publicly traded company.

Mike, you obviously weren't one of the people who got fucked over by epoch when they mysteriously weren't able to pay people due to their own bad management of a situation. or one of the 100's of webmasters who went out of business due to not being paid the money they had rightfully earned. They may have turned it around, but it was at the expense of a lot of others who went out of business so they could eventually return. I am still struggling to trust them ... but clay is impressive, i'll give them that ;-)

lets not forget that when we are here trashing ibill and comparing them to the now seemingly perfect epoch ... ibill has only ever missed 1 payment to me in 4 years, i keep wanting to leave but i just can't find anyone better and NOTHING has happened (yet) that has encouraged me to leave there for long. every 3rd party processor on the market right now has the potential to fall over tomorrow ... my bet for who goes first isn't ibill, but i wouldn't be surprised by any outcome right now ...

Few thoughts
What % of clients do you speculate Ibill actually lost of the Visa fees and of the clients Ibill lost how many we actually worth having?
Am thinking Ibill mostly lost some mom and pops ........
Don't know why that loss is being blamed in the articles, or maybe it is more than I'm speculating

Trying to present information to a stock market and shareholders about a company that processes porn transactions ... LOL ... the 'media relations person' who has nothing to do with the running of ibill, and doesn't even know what a web site is, presented it in a way the public can understand. you are all in the industry, you know things about this company that the shareholders don't, both good and bad ... just because its too hard to explain to the ma & pa shareholders. ignore the media spin and do your research at the main source of revenue, the adult industry ...

Speaking to people about this situation, the 2 most common reasons for not paying the fee to register were 'cant afford it' or 'fuck registering a business, too hard, i'm going to globill'

Vick, I believe that most of the business that was lost was not significant, and with the recent losses of merchant accounts all round with some of the 'big guys', look at how many of the major traffic companies are back using ibill in the last 2 - 3 months ...

I'd say they lost less than 10% of their business over the registration, and i know the potential percentage of the companies that *have* switched back, is significantly larger than 10%

ibill's biggest problem right now is epoch, who are snagging the big companies with good hooks ...

If a company had any reasonable amount of rebills tied up with Ibill they paid their fee regardless or lose the rebill revenue
I haven't activity processed with Ibill in almost a year and haven't used Ibill as a primary processing solution for almost 2 years but still paid the fees rather than lose the rebilling income - was an easy (but distasteful) decision

Think about how many companies didn't bother ... 100's of companies with a few hundred in recurring each month ... nice extra revenue stream for ibill. think about the logic, these companies have only left ibill from 30 - 90 days ago ... rebills are still strong for the first month, good in 2nd ... they won't have lost *that* much money from that yet.

Am I still concerned about the solvency of Ibill? Yes, for various reasons

me too, but i'm just as concerned about the stability of every other 3rd party processor ... i've been hearing 'inside information' about ibill 'about to collapse' for years, if/when it happens, i'll press a button and switch to another processor.