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Originally Posted by DamageX
Let my try painting a picture here and you tell me whether it's white, black or grey.
We're at a point where pretty much every sponsor with an own merchant account and the bulk of sponsors with enough volume to be allowed to are doing pre-checked cross-sales. While pre-checked cross-sales per se may not be bad, what these people are doing is shady, at best. Oftentimes the price of the cross-sales is hidden in fine print, the boxes are tucked away far below the submit button, the wording is made up so it doesn't clearly imply that you'll get charged for the memberships, etc, etc. Shortly put, pushing the legality of the practice to its limits.
Now, how does this affect the industry? Well, for one, these sites do cross-sales between them on pretty much the same pool of surfers. Much like we trade TGP traffic, passing the same surfers from one site to another. The end result? The surfer gets slapped with anything from $100 to $200 (depending on the sites he joins and his location) in charges for the cross-sales and never trusts a paysite with his creditcard again. In many cases the cross-sales are even for sites they'd actually get access to anyway, by joining the site they want in the first place. And as if that was not enough, if they want to cancel, they often get even more cross-sales thrown at then hidden below the submit button on the cancellation page. So they think they cancelled one or two memberships but end up having signed up for different ones instead. Their credit cards get practically raped.
Now, you'd think bleeding the market dry for potential customers would be bad enough, but as it turns out, that's not the biggest problem. See, being that these people are pushing things to such an extreme degree, can you imagine what would happen if the mainstream media got a whiff of this? Just imagine one single loon with an agenda (remember minusonebit anyone?) starting doing research, putting together names of individuals and companies and sending it to mainstream media channels, while dragging in VISA and MasterCard along with it, as supporters. All it takes is one fairly reputable mainstream media source to run a comprehensive story on this and many others would follow suit. Let's face it, in a time when the consumer is struggling to make ends meet, the economy is darker than it's been in many decades and people are losing their jobs and homes, this would make for an incredibly great story and unbelievably suitable scapegoat for many.
Does anyone remember the big stink caused by dialers 6-7 years ago? That is a piss in the ocean compared to what would happen if the above scenario were to take place. What could happen? Worst-case scenario, the end of this industry as we know it. Processors would go out of business, many sponsors (good and bad) would go out of business and with them the majority of affiliates.
Now going back to the sponsors-shooting-themselves-in-the-foot part, they don't give a fuck. They're leveraging their size to squeeze the industry out of one last fast buck, because the ones doing this could easily retire yesterday since they've already got it made. In fact, it is my belief (and to a certain degree actual knowldge) that it's exactly what some of them are doing, squeezing the last drop of blood from the industry, while they already have mainstream projects lined up, getting ready to move on to greener pastures.
Now, the only reason why no one has tipped off the mainstream media about this yet is because those to whom the idea occured also realized that they'd go down with the ship as well. However, the risk of this happening is getting bigger and bigger and all of you who promote these sponsors are, in fact, also risking your short-term paychecks, not only your long-term ones. Because if the shit hits the fan, the FTC gets involved and VISA and MC pull out, fucked doesn't even begin to describe what you will be.
So tell me, is it white, black or grey?
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