To add to this. I just did a search here. You seem to have something personal against us. I don't know what it is. But I don't really care after reading all of your comments either.

John,
I see two problems..

1. You are not going to change NATS to how "I" would like it.. so that defeats the purpose of contacting you.

2. I am going to assume every program is making more cash post-NATS than they were before.. so they aren't going to change anything either.


While I don't have the concrete figures, to hand, to back the argument up, I would agree with Preacher's posted ratios. Almost evey single program that has gone from CCBill to NATS has gone to shit for the affiliate.

For me(like Preacher) as the "affiliate" that makes NATS the problem.. and I am really getting sick of good programs going bad...

I realise it is not "your" fault.. but the use of your product, leads to decreased income to me... that means I aint going to love it..

I now cringe everytime another email comes in from a program saying they are changing to NATS.



If you want to fix one thing... Turn the fucking session/admin timeout off! It is the most annoying thing about NATS admins, and its serves absolutely no purpose at all..
If some fool is accessing their sponsor admins on a public computer and they forget to log out.. they deserve to get screwed..
For the rest of us it is just a useless annoyance!


DD

You know, John, it's the not caring that hurts. ;)

Personal? If you consider watching one's income drop repeatedly when sponsor after sponsor decides to use your product as personal - well then, yes, maybe it is personal. I suppose one would find it really mysterious as to why one would actually earn less with cascading billing.

Just tired of the empty promises and bullshit - that's all.

Thank you for getting more constructive :)

1. How do you know that? If it makes sense of course we will. You're right. I might not agree with everything you have to say but that doesn't mean I won't agree with some of it.

2. I would hope they do overall. However I would never hope that they do at the expense of the affiliate. I know some affiliates dislike NATS but the vast majority that I speak with love it. If affiliates did not like NATS as a whole we would have no where near the market share we have and our business would die. We (Too Much Media) need to do our best to please the affiliate as well as the program owner.

Saying that all programs that move to NATS have gone to shit for affiliates is an assumption and wrong. We get complaints from affiliates that a program moved to NATS and their ratios went to shit. We investigate it. Sometimes it is a tiny change in an affiliate with very little traffic which is a normal fluctuation. Sometimes it is a configuration problem. Sometimes its a bug in the NATS software that the affiliates help us find and we fix. Nothing is ever perfect and if people don't let us know when they're having a problem we can't fix it. When we do these investigations we also look at affilaites as a whole (excluding type-ins, internal traffic, etc.) and as a whole affiliate ratios are almost always better. In some cases they are worse overall and we work with the affiliate program to improve them, most of the time with great success. This doesn't mean some affiliates don't see a decline. But overall affiliates see ratios go up. If all affiliates saw them go down we would have been out of business a long time ago.

I'm sorry you've had a bad experience with the product and I'd love to take a closer look at some examples where you've had a decline in ratios. Maybe there is a problem we are missing. Like I said we're not perfect :) But we can't look into it if people just post "NATS sucks". Contact me, I'll get in touch with the program owner(s) and we'll take a look if you'd like.

As far as the timeout of the affiliate area sessions I understand it being a problem. I will speak with our developers on Monday. Perhaps we could make the setting login specific. So you for instance could set your time out for your accounts to a week or whatever you would like but those who would like it shorter can have their way also. Its very hard to please everyone, but we try our best.

Thanks for being a little more specific with me, I appreciate it. If you'd like to get even more specific and work with us to improve things for everyone I would appreciate it even more.

So don't use the product. Like I said, I read your posts. I really have no desire to even try to work with you on it.

I don't USE your product - your clients do. I, as an affiliate, haven't much choice in the matter. I have as of yet never seen a program ask for its affialiates' opinions on whether or not it should use NATS.

So now your sitting there all smug - just waiting to reply with "I meant don't promote our client's programs!" Well, when you've already built sites and galleries and SEOd pages promoting your clients BEFORE they switched to NATS, what are you supposed to do - just pull those pages? Get banned everywhere for yanking pages? Lose SE traffic? Yeah, okay - I'll get to work on that.

|shocking| I warned you that I didn't have anything constructive to say. It's all opinion, if you don't mind.

You do use it via the programs. I didn't say don't purchase it.

A few (but a vast minority of) programs offer both a CCBill program and a NATS based program but you do a have a point there as far as programs you already use moving to the NATS backend.

As far as programs asking their affiliates if they should move to NATS, not all do but I have seen some do so. I think the problem you're running into is not the affiliate programs not caring, but the vast majority of affiliates wanting NATS.

Too bad you don't have anything constructive to say. Maybe then something would actually be accomplished.

If so, those same affiliates wear bells on their shoes and are awe-struck by blinking lights.

EDIT: Hey John, it was good arguing with you - and you are definitely damn good at it |thumb , but I need to drop out of this thread. I become irrational and somewhat uncivilized (or so I'm told) after awhile and I don't want to destroy the focus of this thread with my idle hostility. Thanks. ;)

John, it is good to see you addressing some concerns about NATS on a board that is all about business. The bottom line is there are no haters here just people that don't want to get screwed and most members here do not mind speaking frankly in public. One would expect you to point back to your users and that is who our beef is with, not the script developers.

Your problem starts with the announcement "XXXXX Sponsor switches To NATS, you need to sign up again..."

Then there is the inability to easily get linking codes for hfs' from sponsors. As an example, a board member recently released 18 hfs'. Site A and site B had five new ones each. C, D, E, and F had two each. A fellow has to repeat the same process 6 times to get 18 links. Seems to me if a not so bright guy could come up with something like HFSLinks then a man that knows the ends and outs of the business since 1996 could make that interface user friendly. (Yep, I know about the add-on that most don't offer or they hide it)

And then, I still don't understand the purpose of encoded/unencoded affiliate codes. Really it is not important for me to understand but there has to be a reason for a sponsor not to offer your option or to hide it so when confronted they can point you to it.

IMO, it is not Danger Dave's, Greenguy's, Linkster's or any other affiliate's responsibility to directly communicate their concerns with NATS to you. I doubt that Danger Dave was being hostile but I am sure he meant every word he wrote and folks around here tend to value his opinion. If the three link list owners I mentioned decided not to promote NATS sponsors, a few hundred others would follow their lead.

This reply is meant to be contructive but I had much rather curse, scream, complain, and insult especially when sponsors get a powerful tool and then treat affiliates like bastard stepchildren. But I don't fault you for selling them the tool.

That's how BVCash is set up, affiliates can choose who they want as primary and it cascades from there. Checks are issued by CCBill and Paycom. The merge CCBill account feature is just too much for me to pass up. I get too many small TGP affiliates signing up every day to go away from 3rd party billing. I don't care if they only do 1 sale a week or even every 2 weeks. I am close to 2000 affiliates now and most of them fit that category. You've seen the "Spam me with CCBill sponsors" threads before.

Our script is far from a $50 script though. It has alot of the same bells and whistles NATS has. Some even before NATS had them. In fact we probably would have bought NATS but it wasn't available in 2001 was it?

This is way too much to absorb at 1 AM Friday night/Saturday morning :D

John - Let me 1st say thank you for coming by the board - regardless of anything good or bad said in this thread, it's good to finally speak to someone from NATS here on this board *because |buddy| knows we've spoke about NATS a lot - lol)

1st thing is that I do actually like a lot of things that NATS has - when the program is not using this silly option that I mentioned in my 1st post, the stats are easy to read & interrupt.

There are, however, a lot of things that I do not like.

1 - What's with the link codes? I think I'm safe in saying that no one here understands the need to have MTUxOjU6MTU be the link code for one site & MTUxOjU6Mw be the link code for another in the same program. Yes, I know there are unencoded links available, but why are those not the default? What is the purpose of the seemingly random letters & numbers?
(edit to add...) and what's with that update that added 0,0,0, to the end of the link codes? What do they do? If they are options where you change the 0's to a different number/letter, can you give me an example of a program that is using it, as I have not seen any that have something different than 0,0,0,

2 - You mentioned that CCBill is a processor, but I think to correctly describe them, they are a processor with an affiliate admin. Paycom is a processor & they're POS affiliate admin shows you nothing but signups & money. CCBill does track clicks & set up banners & a lot of affiliate admin stuff. To be honest, they'd be perfect if they forced the program to use sub accounts for all their tours & then posted the total clicks for individual sub accounts. But, to get to the point, what I really love in their admin is that I can see each individual member that I referred, what they were charged, what I made, how long they stayed & if they were still active. CCBill assigns the member a number & I assume that pretty much all other processors do the same thing. I would really like to see NATS implement this into their stats because the way it is now with NATS (and every other revshare affiliate admin) you have no idea how many recurred, which is a really valuable tool when deciding if a sponsor is worth it or not. If I sent 10 signups to a NATS program & looked a couple months later & saw 5 rebills, is that 5 individual rebills (5 members recurred once & then cancelled) or is that 1 member that recurred for 5 months where 9 cancelled after the trial. That info is critical for anyone promoting revshare programs

3 -
You have to admit, while it may not be lying, it certainly is misleading for a recurring program to show you that you have 9 signups & a total of $362.10 & not point out on the same line that the total is before processing & their cut when every other program out there shows the affiliate they money they made. I understand that the sponsor has the option to show it the normal way or this screwed up way, but NATS gave them that option.

PS - where in the Northeast are you located?

Side Note: Be VERY CAREFUL with anyone you see starting one of those threads - there's a lot of scumbag webamsters using Zango to con signups away from webmasters promoting CCBill sponsors.

true, I'm sure it happens, maybe we need a zango blacklist of known webmasters that buy traffic from Zango


like those tgp submitter blacklists i've heard about

Based on my experiences most of these posts are from people starting what I call a "Fake TGP" (One that's all FHG's and no submissions), or other similar business models that require a lot of sponsors.

I have even seen posts of people wishing they could merge their NATS checks. Obviously they are clueless and that is impossible, they are just frustrated.

It's a big thing, the merge feature. Are all or most of your CCBill sponsors merged under your main ccbill acct for link o rama?

Oh and I agree with you about the ccbill sub account thing. The problem there is in order to do it that way you the affiliate would have to sign up for each new sites sub account. Not too big a deal but most sponsors think that's a bad idea, especially if they have 20 sites. So they usually have "Account Grouping" & "Multiple Redirects" enabled so you can send traffic to any of their sites and only sign up once.

But from what I've heard that will be addressed also in CCBills next version. |headbang|

1 - yes, I did finally merge most if not all of them under 1 account (I find one I missed every few weeks)

2 - I've only signed up to you one time, but CCBill shows stats for 0000, 0002 & 0003 |huh

I promoted a Latina site a long time ago - I won't name the sponsor - which was a very steady seller with a predictable ratio over a fair period of time. And then it stopped selling. It wasn't a steady decline, it just stopped. Perhaps if I was in that situation now and that sponsor had recently switched to NATS I might well blame that.

It's human nature to want a perfect explanation for something that doesn't make sense, when usually the explanation is rather imperfect: a change in traffic; surfers becoming bored with the same ads; a small tour change; a change to the join page; a pricing change.

I dropped that site and tried it with another, but I never achieved similar results with another Latina site. In hindsight, what I should have done was contact the sponsor and made an attempt to resolve the problem.

And on the original topic, NATS is quite adaptable, depending on how you want to present the data. The NATS people are pretty responsive, too. I'd put them up there with CCBill in that regard, which is high praise.

Shunga,

I am sorry.. but you are unlikely to find a "program owner" that dislikes NATS.. just as you have said.. it's great for you!

The problem is that the experience is not so great for the affiliate..

Eg: I had just started promoting your program.. and then you changed to NATS.

Now I have three NATS accounts with you and get three newsletters etc etc... but the fact is I stopped promoting you as soon as you changed.


---------------------------------------------------------
Another Example of Post NATS changes - Unamed CCBill Program

Pre NATS - 85000 - 68 - 1:1200
Post NATS - 20000 - 5 - 1:4700(and getting worse by the day)
----------------------------------------------------------


John, despite what you might see as negative views in regards to NATS, I think this episode/thread might just offer you a unique opportunity.

As Linkster has said, there are many webmasters here that promote 100s of programs/sponsors and have done so for many years. If you sought the advice of these webmasters on the functionality and workings of the affiliate side of NATS I think you could make some great improvements.

1. As GG said.. the "random" type code at the end of links is a huge pain is the ass
2. For me.. The timeout, and the multiple clicking just to recieve one link code is hugely annoying.
3. I am sure other "working" webmasters can give you some imput on possible improvements.


DD

DD, on the contrary, if it's not good for affiliates it's not good for me as a program owner. The top ten affiliates dating from the summer changeover to NATS are doing good numbers, which doesn't point to it being a NATS issue per se. What I'd like to do, if you're willing to contact me privately, is go over this in detail with all the techs involved to see what's happening. Believe me, I value affiliates and view this as a team effort.

Just an odd thing that I came across going thru my stats today: Reality Sites uses NATS. There is no cascade billing, as they only use CCBill. And, they still have CCBill send the money to affiliates.

I really hope they are eating the cost of NATS instead of passing it along to us, as they don't seem to really need it.

Another very confusing option that is being used by Teen Dolls (AlyssaDoll & EmilyDoll) I go in to grab my all time stats & see that I'm averaging a whopping $2.01/member with the trial option. Then I look below:
Rebill & Credit counts will be shown soon. Your payout currently reflects all rebills & credits

I'm not sure if I'm mad at NATS for putting this option in there or at TeenDolls for confusing the fuck out of me :(

Just wanted to let everyone know I haven't disappeared. I had plans last night and again tonight. I will be answering everyone in detail tomorrow as I will not be back until late tonight.

Greenie; We're based in NJ, not too far from you :)

That's good, because as soon as I saw you had posted in here tonight, I was worried about the mental health of someone that spends Friday & Saturday nights replying to message board threads :D

That being said, I'm off to watch the Sabres game..........

The awful cold I have made me think the stats you posted referred to me. But to take something from this thread, if you're interested if you can put up a link for, say, a week, we can track your links specifically and see if there is a problem.

Your point about easy to find links is noted, and I'm going to add those to the welcome page.

Amazing what happens when a big fish makes a complaint publicly.
You get a 3 page thread, how fortunate... not.

NATS - nothing against you personally, but I have my stats too.
Every program that has "switched" has cost me money. Which leads me to believe that there's more options for program owners, all things being equal.

Having used Nats as an affiliate and a program owner I absolutely love nats. I have also had the opportunity to run nats (using mostly epoch and vxsbill) and ccbill side to side as an affiliate and every time the nats solution gave me significantly better ratios. Also never had an issue as an affiliate since if I don't like how a sponsor implemented nats and don't like their setup, then I don't use them. Same goes for mpa and the others.

Must just be a case of preference, because unlike many of you I cant stand using ccbill as an affiliate. Its clumsy, slow, and I know sales aren't being tracked well.

So I assume that TitanBucks doesn't use CCBill as one of their processors...

I can log into any program which uses NATS right now, pull up the stats for this period and click on the last number shown under Unq, which is Total, and recieve an incomplete list of referring URLs. Why is that? Right this moment at TitanBucks, my total of Uniques this period is (woohoo) 13. When I click on 13, I get this:
http://fhg.planetpreggo.com/pp/pregnant-models-x... 2 0 0:2
http://fhg.planetpreggo.com/pp/pregnant-models-x... 1 0 0:1
http://fhg.planetpreggo.com/pp/pregnant-slut-fuc... 1 0 0:1
http://fhg.planetpreggo.com/pp/pregnant-models-x... 1 0 0:1
http://www.whoringwives.com/tgp/pantyhose/ 1 0 0:1
Total 6

Where are the rest, LB? If NATS is so damn good - where are the rest?

And why not display the number of visits to the tour AND to the join page? Is it because NATS allows you to set the cookie expiration so short, that by the time a surfer hits the join page, the cookie is dead and that affiliate tracking has ended?

I can't defend the pregnant yak-like speed of CCBill's affiliate admin, but I never heard anyone say that they don't trust their ability to track joins.

CCBill have been paying me like clockwork for 6 years as an affiliate. I measure results by the number of checks I get through the door and not by affiliate admin detail.

I swear by CCBill because I think they are the best billing company on earth. :)

Oh wow.. thanks for this info, I didn't know that |thumb

DDave (and anyone else) - can you post (or PM) a lost of sponsors that you know have switched from CCBill (or anything else) to NATS?

The stats geek in me thinks it might be interesting for me to pull numbers from my old stats runs & compare them to this next one.

Switched from CCBill to NATS
Twisted Cash
413 Dollars / Kelly Cash
$ammy $mack
Reality Wife / Amateur Porn Dollars
IA Cash

They were using something else (I think the one that Lotza Dollars still uses)

But, needless to say, the list has started :)

I'm going to go thru the Webmaster News archives later today & see what else I can find, because I know I always post the newsletter when a company switches to a new affiliate admin.

I'd also like to ask a couple of the regulars around here to think about posting their stats as well (in the same manner that I do - and we can put them on here with mine if you wish so that it's easier for people to see them)

If you want to try this & I know you (physically shook your hand or spoke to you on the phone) them PM me.

Sammy was using the thing from taboo revenue before nats
naughty bank was using ccbill before moving to mpa3
lisa sparxxx (adult stars pass) moved from ccbill to nats then back to ccbill after an issue concerning rebills
jovicash recently switched
4realcash

Im pretty sure Skincash (Mr Skin) did that change a while back - although they were using ibill as well as ccbill - I dont think that would skew it too much :)

Flashcash changed over a while back - although they were using their own backend if memory serves

Phatchecks - converted about 2 years ago

Realitycash (adult.com) changed from something else to nats

OcCash swapped from ccbill a while ago

pornstardollars swapped over although they didnt use the ccbill affiliate backend

jaymans program swapped over ravenriley if I remember correctly?

and of course it would be hard to check anything with this one - stiffycash over to mayors money with the implementation of nats

Oh and Greenie - since I think I shook your hand once I sent you a PM |jester|

I'm assuming NATS doesn't display the clicks that couldn't be tracked to a ref url?? Though I admit I will have to check that. There is also a similar glitch in the site admin modules where some stats for affiliates aren't displayed ... similar to what you have but with nothing shown. Still waiting for a fix on that, but overall I'm still pretty happy with nats.

Back a while when I worked with another proggy with ccbill, we constantly saw sales not being tracked to the affiliate. The way we were set up these sales shouldn't have been lost, but I put it at around 10-20% of sales not being tracked correctly. I'm not sure whether ccbill just uses cookies, and if so that would be the reason right there. Running ccbill through cascading software (be it custom built, mpa, nats etc) would be the best bet.

[quote=Greenie;317062]They were using something else (I think the one that Lotza Dollars still uses)

GG, yes we're still using TabooTracking Software Company. Very simple and easy to deal with, but I would like to find/write a new software program that would display some more "in-depth" stats.

[quote=Useless Warrior;316606]I don't USE your product - your clients do. I, as an affiliate, haven't much choice in the matter. I have as of yet never seen a program ask for its affialiates' opinions on whether or not it should use NATS.

Useless Warrior...should I switch to NATS? Geez by the looks of this thread it maybe a bad decision ya think?

This is a really good thread ...very interesting

If experience is any indication every program that I have that uses Nats has this tracking problem - the stats on the main page of the affiliate stats will show a number of 1st page hits and join page hits if they configure it that way - but if you go into the specific site you are sending to - the stats dont match - they are usually 20% less for referring urls although they do show the blank referrals and bookmark refs(which is where I would have assumed the discrepancy was) - so Im not sure where the rest go????

I always wonder that aswell, today its even worse then normal at one of my sponsors, I try to track 670 uniques and I get refferals for.....75 uniques :D

|thumb

I think my favorite (not) is PanchoDog. Their NATS stats page will show I have 65-75 uniques on a given day, and when I check the referring URLs it only shows one or two.

My little 2¢ on this stuff.

So one of my sponsors that I have quite a few referrals on under ccBill. switched to NATs. Although they are maintaining all the old linking for ccBill(for now). All WMs need to signup again under NATs for access to promo, and linking codes.

From what I have been able to determine so far, my WMs referrals will no longer be tracked under the new system.

Great way to gain an extra 10% income for the sponsor by screwing the WMs out of their referrals commision.