The Truth About “Shaving”
“you must trust the sponsor to pay you for your traffic, while the sponsor must trust that the traffic you send them is real.”“you must trust the sponsor to pay you for your traffic, while the sponsor must trust that the traffic you send them is real.”
Let me start by saying that in the adult webmastering business, cheating is unfortunately the nature of the beast. While unscrupulous webmasters attempt to defraud sponsors through artificially generated clickthroughs and false signups using fraudulent billing information or stolen credit card numbers, most sponsors will regularly undercount (“shave”) your hits and signups.
Popular third-party tracking solutions may be comforting, but are not foolproof, and at the end of the day you must trust the sponsor to pay you for your traffic, while the sponsor must trust that the traffic you send them is “real.”
You can rest assured that no matter what sponsor you are dealing with, you won’t get paid for all of your sales. This is just a fact of life, and of this business. Is this wrong? Of course it is. Is it unfair? Not necessarily. Consider this: Sponsors (both good and bad) are under tremendous pressure to ‘up’ their payouts, because without webmaster participation, they can’t stay in business, and webmasters go where the money is.
Why stay with a $25 per-signup program when you can easily find $40 (and up to $100 per trial membership!) proggies?
In Mathematics There Is Truth
While everyone trusts their favorite sponsor, some simple mathematics and a little common sense tells you that something just doesn’t add up. For example, pretend that *you are the sponsor* and I send you a surfer who signs up for a $1.\’5 trial membership. Now I want a $42 commission on that $1.\’5 sale. Can YOU afford to pay me – and many thousands more like me – at that rate?
If your regular monthly subscription rate (after the $1.\’5 trial) is $2\’.\’5, and you retain members for an average of three months, you will have grossed $\’1.80. Subtract my $42 commission and you are left with $4\’.80. Now if all that you had to pay was your enormous overhead expenses and still retain a reasonable profit, you may be ok.