Because this is a historic post for Ask Mr Porn it’s not going to be a post filled with links to naked women. Instead It’s gong to be a post about the honesty of porn sites and non porn sites you send your hard earned traffic to.
If you’re a newbie to porn sites you may be shocked to learn that, IMO, every site you sign up to as an affiliate is going to cheat you. Some cheat you big time some cheat you small time but as I said, IMO they all cheat you.
It’s been an ongoing problem since I became a porn site webmaster way back in 1996. The problem is it’s 100% impossible to track all of the surfers you send to a site. It always has been. You will always find a discrepancy between the traffic your stats say you sent and the traffic the site you are selling memberships to, says they received.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a paysite, an AVS site, a free site. If they are paying you they are cheating you one way or another. The usual method is just not counting all of the traffic you sent.
There is always going to be a discrepancy between what you send and what they received. How is that possible? Simple. Not everyone who clicks a link on your site actually gets to the site you sent them to. Some are hitting their back button as soon as they clicked the link, some are lost due to the nature of the net and some are lost because the site they were sent to was unreachable for one reason or another. To much traffic, servers to busy, net is messed up somewhere between you and the site you are sending traffic too. There are many reasons the traffic you sent may not have arrived at the site you sent them too.
These reason are exploited by most affiliate sites. However some exploit this lack of reliable stats and cheat you out of your traffic. Now I’ve been at this long enough to know that my dropout rate is around 1.5% to 2%. How do I know that? Simple. I have my own paysite and I keep track of the surfers I send and how many actually arrive. Somewhere between 1/100 to 2/100 surfers just disappear into the void.
This 1 to 2% has been pretty much the same since I started tracking where my traffic goes. It’s what I expect to lose in the natural course of events. Higher than that and I’m probably being cheated on my traffic. Because I tracked this problem for years and never saw much change I quit the tracking. NBD.
Why would a website you are sending traffic to cheat you? Again it’s simple. Greed, Money, the almighty dollar, yen dinar, peso or whatever currency you deal with. They have little to no chance at being caught and their excuse for the 20% difference between your stats and theirs is the surfers got lost somewhere between clicking the link and arriving at their site.
If a paysite, avs or other membership site steals 10% of your traffic from the very first day you will likely never know they are doing it. Yes, it’s that simple. It’s so simple they can set up a script to do it for them in about 5 minutes.
Now and then some site will get busted because someone sent a friend to signup, and that friend signed up, but you never receive credit for it. Now you have the proof you need to know you are being cheated. However if you confront the site about it you’re going to hear they had a problem with their stats being credited correctly. Lol, yeah, right, the real problem they had was they got busted stealing from you. It’s the standard excuse if you bitch about it.
Now if you go post somewhere about it you are going to be jumped on by a lot of people who are loyal to that site and don’t think they have ever been cheated. You are going to be made miserable on any forums or blogs you may post in. In the end the cheating bastards are going to get away with it and you are going to be made to look like a fool. That’s standard operating procedure.
Lol, don’t think this just applies to porn sites tho. Non adult sites do the same thing. Non adult may be even worse as they have organized squads of friends ready to go to the forums and blogs to dispute what you say. How do I know that? Because it’s a recommended tactic by some of the bigger gooroos in non adult marketing. Lol, like politics, they have been given the name “Truth Squads”. There’s about as much truth in them as there is in politics.
You need to understand that if you bitch a bunch or accuse them of cheating you or not delivering what they said they would you will be attacked, marginallized and in the end your reputation ruined just because you told the truth or caught them in a theft situation or in a lie.
It’s not impossible to win and that’s also a fact. I’ve won a couple of those battles but only because I know I’m right and had the integrity and the resolve to keep going until I won. Way back in the day I put the first avs I belonged to out of business because of the blatant stealing. Basically they weren’t to bright and I had the proof and the people I was close to managed to prove the same thing to themselves after I told them how to go about it. The avs went out of business after a short battle with me. You can win but it’s really an uphill battle.
For a very long time I fought for the little guy and for the right to say what your opinion was. I started this blog originally as a SMF forum in protest against an avs who threatened to ban me for telling the truth. Turns out the forum was wildly successful and had tons of members. It had some power in the adult world.
MOF I was a member of a team of webmasters who worked with the avs to help webmasters to do better and the avs to do better also. Then the avs decided to get greedy and got rid of 90% of their webmasters and kept all of their future rebills. Lol, they got rid of me too, not because I wasn’t making them money because I was making them and me both a ton of money.
What happened was the advisory board of webmasters and the avs decided to do an end run around me and didn’t let me in on the plans. Good strategy on their part as I would have revealed that plan the minute I heard it and they knew it. Sure I’d signed a non disclosure agreement but I’d have violated it in a heartbeat over what they did. No doubt about it. It’s sometimes a dilemma about what to do but my integrity means more to me than the legality.
What many don’t know about that fight is after the avs had booted everyone they could I got several calls and a couple of emails asking me to rejoin the group. While it cost me over 50 thousand dollars in lost rebills, advertising and other money, I maintained my integrity and did not go back to them. Never will and to this day I still refuse to deal with the people who stayed there. IMO they helped the avs cheat all those other webmasters and if they’d cheat their fellow webmasters they’d sure as hell cheat me if I gave them the chance. I didn’t give them that chance.
You see, IMO you only have one thing that is yours alone. That’s your honesty and integrity. When you give that up you’re just another crooked bastard in the scheme of things. Your word is your bond and without that you have nothing. My reputation is more important to me than picking up some quick, dirty money. Your’s should be too.
As a general rule I say a lot of things some people think I shouldn’t say. To that I say this. What I bring out into the open is what a ton of people are thinking but are afraid to say. Lol, sorta like this post. It’s going to piss some people off a lot and I don’t give a fat rats ass. It’s the truth. Heh, I got tired of being famous or infamous and after all the crap was over with I decided to maintain a much lower profile and have done that for about 6 years now so it’s not likely you’ve heard of me before.
Okay, enough of a history lesson. How do you combat the cheating that goes on? It’s hard to do and if you bring it out in the open or question an avs, paysite or other membership site you will be attacked. If you can’t handle that then keep your mouth shut. Move to a different site that doesn’t cheat you as much.
There are many ways to check what your traffic is doing. For years I used Central Ad to tell me which links were clicked on and would then compare my clickthru rate to what the site says they received. If there was to big a discrepancy I would just stop sending them traffic and send it to a place that didn’t cheat as much.
Another way to set up checking is to send all the traffic that clicks a link to a redirect page that will auto send them to the site you want them to go to. It’s easy enough for anyone to do. Simple set up a meta redirect on a different page and every surfer that clicks a signup link gets sent to the redirect page. From the redirect page they get sent to the website. Now just go check your stats and see how many hits the redirect page got and how many hits the membership site says it got.
It seems that an acceptable level of cheating is about 10% so if your redirect page stats say you sent 500 and the membership site says they got 350 it’s time to move on because you are working with some truly greedy bastards. As I said above my stats show a 1.5 5to 2% loss rate to my paysite. That means out of 500 people sent I should only lose 5 to 10 people. It’s an average but it’s still what I rely on.
There is software you can buy that will give you an even more accurate click thru rate. If you worry a ton about being cheated to much I’d suggest you go buy it and use it. You’ll be surprised at what it tells you and you’ll also be very disappointed that all the places you thought you could trust, you can’t.
While the meta refresh method isn’t as accurate as I’d like it is accurate enough to reveal sites that are cheating you big time. the software you can get will do a better job but it does cost money. Depends on what it’s worth to you to know how much you are being cheated.
So what prompted this post on the anniversary of the 500th blog post on Ask Mr Porn? Well, it’s also simple. When your previous stats say you’ve been sending 400 surfers a month to a site and they say you’ve been sending 350 over the past 8 months and then it suddenly drops to 50 or 60 a month you should have a clue something is going on.
Particularly when your stats say your traffic has increased and so have the clickthrus to the site. Yet they say you have declined 80-90% in the surfers you sent. Lol, now who ya gonna believe, your stats or the stats of the site you’re sending traffic to? I’m going to believe my own stats and so should you. It really is that simple.
So if stats aren’t within a few percent you are probably being ripped off. The bigger the percentage of the discrepancy the more you are being ripped off. While I’m not going to mention any names this is an actual factual example and I have stopped sending any traffic to that site.
Another example happened just this week. One of the membership sites I send traffic to all of a sudden has a huge discrepancy in the amount of visitors I know I send and the amount of visitors they receive. I haven’t done anything about it yet because it’s the first major incident and I’m waiting to see if it gets resolved or if I’m just going to have to up and move and send that traffic to another site.
Anytime you see a drop in your stats at a membership site but your stats are on the upswing you should know something is wrong and to pay closer attention to what’s going on. If it doesn’t change back in a short amount of time then move your sites to someplace else. You see not everyone is overly greedy and lots still only steal the 10% or so. It’s the really greedy bastards that try to get away with more.
I have several things I do to check to see if it’s a real problem or if it’s just a blip in the stats. Sometimes it is just a blip but more often than not they’ve decided to steal more. It’s up to you to decide the amount of theft of your traffic that you can live with but for me that stops at 10%.
Other than not counting the hits to the membership site there are also things they can do with credit card processing to screw you out of your money. How do you know the decline that was posted was real? How do you know they didn’t just keep the money and tell you the card was declined. Lol, you don’t and you are never going to be give access to prove it. There are a ton of ways membership and affiliate sites can screw you out of your money and even I don’t know them all.
I’ve noticed a worsening of this problem since the economy went to hell and I don’t expect it to get better anytime soon. MOF I expect it to get worse as unemployment stays high and is still rising. Some of the expert economists said this morning they expect unemployment to remain around 10% for all of 2010 so with that forecast I expect you are going to see more and more affiliate and membership sites cheating you.
So the fact of life on the internet is you are going to be cheated. Believe that. It just depends on whether you are cheated big time or small time. Do what you can to minimize the known cheats by moving your traffic. Other than that there is very little you can do to not get cheated. If you suspect cheating check it out until you are satisfied and if you are being cheated move on to another place.
It’s your only real option. Some places cheat a lot, some places cheat a little. Try to stick with those who only cheat a little.
For those who are going to say I’m lying to you I say prove it! I expect there will be some who accuse me of cheating with SE or whatever. That’s not true either. What is true is I spent a lot of time working on the gray areas of the rules. In some instances I still do. The gray areas are where the money is or at least the easier money is. Lol, no, I don;t have any mininets. DO have a meganet tho. I do my best not to lie to surfers and my pages say what they have and there is no tricking surfers into anything. If I say nude teens those sites have nude teens. If I say tiny tits those sites have tiny tits. If I say 2000 pics inside there are 2000 pics inside.
So people will try to question my integrity to make you believe that none of this cheating and stealing of your traffic and money is going on. With the exception of one page on the non adult side of things I don’t lie, cheat or steal. A gooroo said an easy way to make non adult bucks was to use a frameset to hold the sales page and then go copy a page from wikipedia and put it on the non frames part of the page as text. Oh, no plagiarism involved as Wikipedia pages are not copyrighted and you can use the text and links on them if you wish. Go read their site and see if I’m lying to you. 
So I bought a domain name for a longtail SE term, got it free hosted, and did what the gooroo said to do. Guess what, it works. However I’m not going to do it again because even tho it’s 100% legal it’s feels scammy to me. Sure you can make money doing it but it just doesn’t feel right so even tho it works pretty well I won’t be doing it again.
So all of the people that will probably come out of the woodwork to attack this post can kiss my ass. OTOH I’m not famous anymore so maybe nothing will be said. Lol, I can always hope.
Anyway if you think you are being cheated to much just quit sending traffic to the site doing the excess cheating and find a better one. Heh, if you think the adult side is scammy then stay away from non adult because it’s as bad or worse.
If you’re new to porn or the net and want to make money get used to the fact you are going to be cheated. Adult or non adult, doesn’t matter. It’s a fact of life. Try to keep it within limits and you’ll do just fine.