Category Archives: Webmasters

Beware of Pink Video aka XTC Media Group

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Today’s post is less of a news story and more of a consumer warning.

Lately it seems we’ve been hearing about a lot of scam warnings from porn producers out of Florida.  It almost makes one wonder why anyone does business with any of those outfits out there.  Well today is no different.  There is a company out of Florida called Pink Video who also goes by the name XTC Media Group.  They recently scammed a website owner out of nearly $40,000.

What is wrong with people?

The buyer wires the content provider nearly $40,000.  The wire is from a major bank, Bank of America.  The wire was confirmed received THREE WEEKS ago.  Pink Video held on to the nearly $40,000 for going on three weeks now and yet didn’t deliver what the buyer purchased.  They have had a multitude of excuses but the best one is that, despite the fact that the wire took place three weeks ago, just yesterday the bank put a hold on the funds, some three weeks AFTER the fact, due to “suspicious activity”.

I also happen to do business with Bank of America so I went ahead and called them and told them this story.  The lady informed me that in the 23 years she has been in banking she has never heard of such a thing.  If there is a problem or some suspicious activity it would flag the day the money came in but not three weeks later.  That just flat out isn’t going to happen under any circumstances but beyond that, they would not put a hold on the entire account, they would just put a hold on the incoming funds from the wire for 5 to 10 business days depending on the amount of the wire or the location of the transfer.  The guys from Pink Video claims the bank put a hold on their entire account.  These people don’t even know how to lie well and again keep in mind the wire was sent THREE WEEKS AGO, not 3 days or even 10 days but THREE WEEKS!

Anywho, if you are in the market to buy content you might want to avoid doing any sort of business with a company called Pink Video or XTC Media Group.  It looks like these guys may take your money and run with it.

 

 

 

 

How to know if your sponsor is about to go out of business

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Lamis at GFY made an interesting observation.  Hate to say it but damn I think he may be on to something.

This is a very simple method that worked 9 out of 10 times in the last 2 years with dozens of sponsors.

Check their Copyright year in FOOTER, right now, I would say that if they didn’t update the copyright footer, and it says 2007 or sooner, they are probably in danger. It shows that they didn’t even care to update that simple footer, and that they don’t have at least 1 free minute in a full year to take care about the program.

Yeah, you can laugh and insult and quote me and makes jokes, just make sure you keep laughing when they close the sponsor and don’t pay your money, and run away.

  • Alerts are: © 2007, © 2006 or sooner.
  • Fine is: © 2010 © 2011
  • Medium: © 2008 © 2009

You will see most webcam sponsors that are doing U$ 1 millon or more per month, have 2010 or 2011, which is obvious, because their webmaster checks their GOLDEN Chicken every few mins…

While all obsolete dead sponsors have 2005 or less…

Video Secrets Caught Being Shady Again

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While not a shock to most people who know Video Secrets, as for years now they have been found time and again scamming and cheating but for those of you dumb asses still stupid enough to do business with them or associate yourself with them in any way HINT FUCKING HINT XBIZ here is a nifty little story I found for you fuckers today from GFY.

 

Video Secrets Cookies = 0 days?
From a post on the pond, it was brought up that VS TOS shows a 0 day cookie. The affiliate then allegedly emailed VS and was told there is a 30 day cookie. However, when I just checked VS TOS, that section still appears: 

6.5

(iii) A person shall not be deemed a “referral” entitling You to any commission or referral fee of any kind if that person leaves the Company site after having been directed there through the hyperlink banner ad or other promotional link (which has been supplied to You by Company) on Your website, without becoming an Company subscriber or purchaser of services of a type that entitles You to a commission or referral fee, even if at some later time that same person returns to the Company website(s), not through the banner ad or other promotional link (which has been supplied to You by Company) on Your website, and at that later time becomes a subscriber to the Company site or a purchaser of services from the Company.

If it was truly a 30 day cookie, why would the TOS not be changed in order to reflect that 30 day cookie?

In short, it says if a person clicks your banner and is taken to their site, and then leaves their site without making a purchase, even if that same user returns to the website later, it’s not a referral and we get no commission. 

So, a user has to make a purchase while they are on the site the very first time or we get dicked.

Ooops! Someone has been a naughty bird!

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I was searching for a video today on YouTube when something caught my attention.  I clicked on the profile page for Bluebird Films and I noticed a nasty message from YouTube.

When I seen this message I thought I would take this opportunity to remind everyone that Google isn’t porn friendly like some people tend to think.  Sure, they may tolerate us with their search engine but that is only because we create them a crazy amount of cash because people love to search for porn but when it comes to other Google owned services they aren’t quite as open minded and that especially includes anything on their YouTube service.

They will ban stuff that isn’t even X rated.  In fact, I can recall several videos that showed not a single naked body but featured porn stars, although not naked so the movies can banned.  Why ban the video when not a single hint of nudity was shown?  Because sexuality was implied which means that basically any and all adult movie trailers are technically a violation of their terms of service and community standards.

But you know what bothers me?  How extremely biased they are.  Why are some videos allowed and yet others are not?  Here is a video on YouTube from PlayboyTV.  The video opens up with a girls bare ass, dancing around in a g-string.  Apparently that’s ok.  But showing a PG rated porno movie trailer, not so much.  I just don’t get it.  I really don’t.

Anywho the point of me making this post is just to remind all of you guys out there that Google isn’t quite as friendly to porn as some people would have you believe.  Yes they tolerate us when they have to but when it comes down to it, they don’t want our kind around.  So beware when using any Google owned service.  If you piss off the powers that be, it may just give you and all sites you are associated with in hot water.

 

 

 

Are you social networking stupid?

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Social networking sites have become an invaluable resource for adult website owners, not just because of the promotional opportunities but also because Google has decided to place a large amount of relevance on search engine results in the hands of those social networking sites.

Yet still hardly a day goes by that I don’t see some webmaster misusing the services of these social networking sites.  They seem to have no basic idea how the importance of the sites and instead just randomly spam them as if that will do them any good.  Then you see those same webmasters on industry boards bitching about how stupid sites like Twitter are.

I look at their spam accounts on these social networking sites and I can’t help but wonder if they really don’t know better or if they are just lazy.  I’m the kind of person who likes to see the best in people so I’m going to just assume they just don’t know better so I’m going to take a few moments and help them out.   I’m going to share with them invaluable information that will help some of these people take better advantage of social networking sites like Twitter.

I hate to call people out because so many people do it but look at this twitter account of a well known, award winning director.  (See Image Below)  You will notice that in 24 hours he tweeted 4 times and each of those 4 tweets are pretty much exactly the same tweet.  Can anyone say spamalicous?  He actually tweets the same message several times a day, every day and nothing else.  Does he think that somehow his previous 27 messages got deleted and his followers couldn’t see them anymore?  Or maybe he just doesn’t understand how Twitter works or that people are LOLing at him. I don’t know.  He’s actually a really nice guy so to see someone like him make this mistake makes me realize maybe helping you guys out is the right thing to do.

 

When you setup your twitter account the one thing you have to do is use it.

Now let me be clear, when I say “use it” I don’t mean spamming random things from time to time about your latest movies or some update on your site.

Instead what I mean is, actually get involved in the community.  Tell your followers what you did that day, what you ate for dinner, what you watched on TV.  Sure you may not have many followers today but the more you chat about random, seemingly stupid things, the more followers you will start to get.  Are you on the set today?  Take a few pics with your nifty iphone and post them.  Tell them about how you like blondes over brunettes and why that is.  Are you a website owner?  That’s great, put a link to your website in your profile but then really from that moment on your promotion of your site should stop.  From that moment on you need to focus on you the person, not you the website owner.  Talk about your favorite kind of socks and some movie you may go watch.  Go out of your way to do whatever you can to appear not to be promoting your website.  Sure you can make subtle references from time to time about how you are working on some updates for your site but for every one of those kind of tweets, you should have 20 more that are very clearly not self promotional.

Did you see some cool star in the sky?  Did some commercial you just watch annoy you?  These are all the kind of weird things you should be tweeting about.  Is your cousin’s ex boyfriend coming to visit you and you have to take them to tour NASA?  Great!  Tweet about it.

In time you’ll gain more followers, real followers, because you have become a real part of the twitter community and the more followers you get the more of an authority Google considers you.  Now every once in awhile you can tweet a picture about some hot new chick you’ve added to your website or some hot new girl you are going to shoot a scene with.  And by every once in awhile, I do mean no more than once per day.  That’s just enough to peak their interest in whatever it is your are trying to promote without rubbing people the wrong way and getting you labeled as a spammer.

So now you have this valuable social networking account.  Now every once in awhile you can tweet URLs that will help improve their search engine rankings.  You can also generate a buzz on anything new you have updated.  Congrats! 🙂

 

What do people really think of Wicked Pictures?

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As a business owner, have you ever wondered what people think or say about your business? Well thinks to the rise in social networking sites and webmaster gathering holes like xbiz.net, you can find out. Here is some of the chatter about Wicked Pictures, a company who used to matter but has recently been the butt of many jokes in terms of their operations.  So what exactly are people saying about Wicked Pictures and how they do things?

One guy said — I don’t think Wicked makes much off their website, because it is never updated. Their affiliate site is never updated. They have never had a good site nor ever made a separate site just featuring Jenna Jameson content. The shift into education for them is not gonna fly, cause no one is better than Nina Hartley at instruction. This is a company that won’t shift into the new digital age at all. I don’t think anyone there knows anything about computers. If they did, they would have ditched Brad and done everything in the world to keep Jenna, because in the late 90s, her name was one of the top 20 search terms daily. Does anyone remember that Excite live ticker that would show you which keywords people were searching for? Jenna’s name would come up at least once a minute.

The next guy chimed in with his response — Manwin (the guys responsible for Pornhub, Keezmovies, and lots of other tube sites full of stolen content) have taken over Wicked’s online business.  It’s hard to believe that Wicked would sign a contract with the very people who have had a huge hand in making all of Los Angeles DVD studios content essentially worthless. But I guess all of those guys from the big studios are getting desperate these days.

So to sum it up, stupid and desperate. That’s what people are saying about you Wicked.   Hopefully you use this opportunity as a learning experience.

Thinking of using Paxum? Maybe you should think again

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With ePass gone, what is a webmaster to do?  Some are looking into using the new service called Paxum.  It works a lot like ePass did only they tend to be a little more above board when it comes to record keeping, so we at least give them credit for that.

But what I don’t like about them is how fucking expensive they are.  They boast “low fees” but what they call low fees I call fucking outrageous.   There is the $45 a year fee for the privileged of doing business with them,

Then there is the $2.5 fee to ATM money out on top of the $.25 per transaction fee for transferring the funds from your e-wallet to your card, then there is the $1 fee the charge you to change your pin code, the nearly $50 they charge you to replace a lost or stolen card, which does not include the $50 to $100 express shipping fee they will charge you to mail you the card, $50 per wife fee, $5 to load money to your account from ACH and the list goes on and on of fees they charge you.  It’s really fucking insane how much this company charges you to handle your money.  I don’t fucking get why people use them.   Here is their full list of fees.

I get people don’t like checks but holy fucking shit, is this really the only solution?

Before you do think about using them, if you are fine with the insane amount of money they charge you read this ….

Here’s Tranza’s (from GFY) personal experience with Paxum.  So far it’s not looking like Paxum has their shit together.

Ok, I didn’t want to bring this to the boards, but enough is enough.

I opened my Paxum account in November.

After sending my docs, and getting my account accepted (which took a couple of weeks), my card was finally shipped.

I got hit with a $45 card fee on December 15. And was told that my card was sent on Dec 23.

So far so good (I’m not happy to pay a fee even before I get the card, but what ca I do, right?).

On January 17, after no news or card, I talked to Ruth, from their support, about my card. She guaranteed that it was shipped on Dec 23, and that I should get it within 2 weeks.

On February 3, no card yet, I contacted Ruth. She apologized, said that it might have been lost in the mail, and told me she was going to send me a new card, through express shipping, and it would take 1 week for me to get it.

Today I received a card, with a postal office stamp from January 18 (I figure it was the first card sent?)!!

Fine, fuck it, I’m happy to be able to use it finally.

I go to the ATM, and try to withdraw some money. It shows “insufficient funds”. I’m like: WTF? I have almost $3k on that account!

I go online, and find out I had to transfer my money from the checking account to the credit card. No biggie.

I do that, and check my statements. And what do I find on the statements???

I got hit with a SECOND $45 card fee on February 3rd. AND a $95 EXPRESS SHIPPING FEE!

WTF!!!

Cliff notes: Got hit with a $45 fee on December 15th. The card was only mailed on January 18th. On February 3rd I talk to support because I didn’t get my card yet, they send me a new one and charge me a $140 fee, without my approval!!

I really do hope I get a full refund on those fees. AND I hope you guys improve your game. So far I’m not impressed at all!

The Epassporte Drama Never Ends

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There is always some sort of cry baby drama going on over at the AVN owned GFY (gofuckyourself.com) and well, today is no fucking different.  Actually that’s not true.  Today is a little different because today someone got banned from the popular industry board for telling the truth.  Only he made the mistake of telling the truth about one of the big boys and we all know how you can’t cross anyone in the fucking lame as “bro club”.

Well I say fuck those fuckers.  Epass was a big time member of the bro club and after fucking over 1000s of people, he apparently still gets to keep his membership. This is going to be one of those long and fucking complicated stories to stick with me. In the end you’ll see how the guy who fucked you all from epass is still in and around the big boys making money off of all of you fuckers still.

So let me connect all the little fucking dots for you people.

Python is an affiliate program who has been around since at least 1996. Back in the day it was headed up by a man who nobody would ever for a moment question his integrity, David Vanderpoel. Nobody has really seen or heard from him in awhile. Although he apparently still holds a financial interest in the company, but he’s moved on to bigger and better things. But the company hasn’t died out. In fact they acquired another affiliate program called Dollar Machine.

The “owner” of Python / Dollar Machine (or so says the industry buzz) is a man named Chad Moldon. He is married to a super hot fucking chick named Shaliza Somani.

She was a part owner of epass and was even heavily involved in the making of Middle Men and given a co-executive producer credit so don’t let her hot looks for a moment fool you.  She helped the owner fuck you all out of a shit ton of money.  Every single dime you lost to the ePass scam you can in part blame her.  Again I don’t care how fucking hot she is, the bitch fucked you out of your money.

This chick is said to still be working with Chris Mallick from ePass.  This is not some drama from her past, this is present day as she is still associating with the fucker from ePassporte.

By the way, the guy who brought this information to light was banned from posting on GFY anymore.  Apparently thou shall not speak ill will against anyone in the bro club.  AVN great job at running your shit man.  Thought you were going to clean up those boards?  Good job you are doing there.

DEA posts on GFY …. Anyone pushing traffic to python.com or DollarMachine is putting food and wine on Shaliza Somani ‘s Table …she is married to the owner Chad Moldon.  Shaliza you personally had atleast %5 in epassporte holdings and if Chris Mallick sharted you were there to clean up the mess…How much time did you spend working on Middle Men Movie BOMB ?.Where is the money honey? Why have you gone MIA from GFY ?

What Gives?

hmm… http://chadandshaliza.com/
http://www.Python.com

Fuck DollarMachine
Fuck Python.com
Fuck Epassporte

 

Michael O on GFY writes …. Its pretty clear now that Chris stole a lot of money from a lot of people right?  Shaliza is still associating with him and working with him so I have a hard time seeing what your problem is.

I liked Shaliza a lot and were very happy working for her for almost 5 years but she were Chris’ right hand woman and is still working for/with him! So that make her as guilty in my eyes as Chris is and as Chris have stated on this board his key people had a stake in ePassporte.

Cold Hard Cash Holds All Lupe Affiliate Payouts

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Webquest, who runs the affiliate program called Cold Hard Cash (as well as Vivid Cash) which first became popular as the “Sunny Leone” affiliate program, recently brought in a new star – Lupe Fuentes.  Yesterday they took her site down in light of the legal troubles Little Lupe is having, but in doing so said they would keep paying out affiliates.  That has now changed.  They are holding any and all money from that site.  Chances are any money you made promoting the ILoveLupe.com site, you won’t ever see a dime of it.  Bet they wished they were paying more attention to Sunny Leone now. LOL

When a webmaster specifically asked if they would be paid at all here is the CHC reply —–

CHS says – “Nope. We are guarantying affiliate commissions until further notice, period.”

Prior to that here is a letter they posted on GFY.  I don’t know why they also didn’t email that letter to affiliates.  I checked and I didn’t get a copy and I have a CHC account.  Makes no fucking sense they wouldn’t email it.

Dear ColdHardCash Affiliates

ILoveLupe.com is down for reasons beyond our control. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. At this time, we are not sure how long the site will be down for.

However, we want to make sure our affiliates are taken care of for the time being at our expense. Thus, until further notice from us, we will continue to compensate affiliates for lost commissions during this time based on payout averages from our last pay period. For example, if you averaged $60 a day in commissions last period, you will make $60 a day in the coming period.

Rest assured, all content contained on ILoveLupe.com is and was 100% legal and is not in any way related to the allegations against Lupe that are circulating in the press.

We appreciate your continued business with the CHC affiliate program and will keep you updated on the status of ILoveLupe.com as new information arises.

 

Less is More when it comes to Banner Ads

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Hello my name is Kelli and I’ve been in the adult industry now for almost 15 years. I wanted to share some of my advice with others in hope that it can help them improve their site and make more money. So here is an article I wrote about posting banners on your website and how to make more money with sponsors. You can find more of my advice articles at Porn Royalties under the webmaster tips.

So you’ve created your adult site and you want to make money with it. Great? But now what? Well the most obvious thought would be to try and get someone to buy a banner ad from you. But there is a problem; most people just flat out don’t buy banner spots outright on websites anymore. Instead what they say is something like…. we have no real way to know how your traffic will perform for us. Why don’t you go ahead and put up our banners anyway, but instead of us paying you outright or pay you a flat fee, we’ll pay you only if your traffic converts for us. In other words, if your traffic makes us money, we’ll pay you. If it doesn’t, because their site is poorly designed or for whatever reason, it just sucks to be you, because you get paid nothing.

Then they offer you the option of being paid a flat fee per sale (also known as PPS) or a % of the sale for as long as that person stays a member of the site (rev-share). Since you don’t really have many options you pretty much have to agree to it. This is a very common practice in the adult industry. There is nothing wrong with it … it’s just sort of the way things are in our industry. So then the question becomes, how can you make sure you are maximizing your earnings?

Most people for some reason or another think that the best idea is to sign up for as many affiliate programs as they can and post a crazy amount of banners all over their site.

There is a guy who recently launched his site. This is a guy with more than a decade’s experience in this business so you can’t exactly say he’s making a noob mistake. He’s been around the block a few times so he really should know better. Obviously not. It was actually his website that convinced me to write this article.

So the guy calls his website “an electronic trade show”. You load the page and you get his log. Below that there is a banner spot 728×90 Directly below that there are 8 – oh yes EIGHT 100×100 banner icon spots available. Then the site is broken down into 3 columns, much like the design of a blog.

Of the left sidebar they are offering 3 text links, then banner ads at the sizes of

  • 160×107
  • 160×107
  • 100×100
  • 160×600
  • 100×100
  • 100×100
  • 125×350
  • 160×600

The right hand side bar offers 5 banners in a row, each one about 180×300 in size. Then if that wasn’t enough there are ads available in sizes

  • 120×240
  • 125×350
  • 180×150
  • 150×220
  • 125×350

All of that and I still haven’t even gotten to the middle column yet. There he offers 7 banner spots 468×60 in size. And between each of those 7 banner spots he offers a row of icon banners – 5 icon banners of 100×100 each. That’s 35 ads on the front page middle column alone!

You notice the one thing I never mentioned was any sort of content at all?

That’s right, because there is none. The only text on the page is to tell you that the site is an “electronic trade show” and that you have the opportunity to place your ad on his site by and that you should hurry and act now to get your banner on his new site.

Search engines typically consider any site with more ads than actual content spam and those types of sites get SEO penalties, but even worse, they pass those penalties over to the sites listed on them. It’s a guilt by association kind of thing. So in terms of SEO you can see why having a ton of banners on your site is a bad thing.

There are other reasons though not to add too many.

The more ads you have on your page, the longer it takes your page to load and the longer it takes your page to load, the more likely it is to leave. Long page load times are the kiss of death. Even 1 extra second is a bad, thing. On that note, your page should never take longer than 8 seconds to load. Well that’s what the experts say. 8 seconds seem rather long to me but that’s an issue for another day.

The next reason not to have a ton of ads on their site is a quality issue. If your site has a bunch of ads on it, your site may appear junky and as such lose trust with the visitor. Loss of trust means they are less likely to buy anything from anyone associated with your site. So it hurts your overall signup ratios.

In addition, it increases your bounce rates. A bad bounce rate not only hurts your overall site SEO but also the value of your ad space and the site itself. What if one day you want to sell your site? If you have crappy bounce rates you will flat out lose money in the sale price. People pay more for a site that has better bounce rates. The same goes for selling ad space. There will come a time (later on in this article) where you will get people to pay you for links on your site and they will pay you more if you have a better bounce rate.

When it comes to putting ads on your website, it’s all about quality over quantity.

You want to only put a few ads per page, ever.

I have my own personal websites, about 91 at last count and I have almost no ads on any of them because I learned a long time ago the value in having less. LESS IS ALWAYS MORE! And that plays a big part as to why my affiliate signup ratios are very good – with some programs 1:200 and better.

So now what you have to do is figure out what affiliate program is best for you. Since you only have a limited number of ad spots available now on your site, you want to use the ones that make the most money for you.

Look carefully at the people you have already done business with. Hopefully you have been charting your relationship and by that I mean, keeping a spreadsheet that says each month how much traffic you have sent to each affiliate program, and how much money you have made. Is it extremely important that you do that, no matter what – at all times for every company you do business with. How in the world are you going to improve upon your success if you don’t know what you have to work with in the first place?

So look carefully at the numbers month to month. Which of these programs has done well for you? Those that you already have been doing well with are obviously the ones you want to continue working with. Which is also why you always need to keep up with a monthly sponsor spreadsheet. If you don’t know who is making good money for you or who is sucking, then how do you know who to keep sending your traffic to?

So now you have the few companies you want to work with. Look carefully at the pages within your website. Don’t just throw up a few banners and hope for the best. Did you know that sometimes the beds ads are those less obvious?

For example, on one of my porn star sites sure I could throw up JOIN VIVID NOW ads everywhere but instead, I use no Vivid banners. Not a single one. Instead what I do is talk about how great one of her movies is, and then say something like “oh by the way if you like this movie you can click here to watch it online right now from the official Vivid website” and I now do this with Erotic Videos. I have like 50 links out there on my various porn star websites, each talking about a certain movie and in there I’m like “click here to watch this movie now” and then provide a link to the movie on Erotic Videos or Klub Kelli or Amateur District, depending on what the movie in question is.

The click through ratio on something like that is so much higher than if I put up a bunch of banners and hoped people clicked on them because they thought the banner might be pretty.

Let’s be real, banners aren’t what they used to be. You have to get creative in the way you promote your sponsors.

Every website is different so I can’t just give you a general –THIS is what you should do- statement because what one person needs to do to is very different than what another person should do. All I can suggest is that you look at your website, consider the type of content you have then from there consider ways you can work links to your sponsors within the content itself. On one site I did these detailed movie reviews and then within the review was like “now available on DVD” and then put in a link to my DVD retail store which I had setup through Mallcom.

So in closing I just want to make sure that you understand the overall point of this article and that is that trying to throw up to many ads on your web page is a very bad thing. Be selective and unique in how and who you deal with.