In spite of what Mike South says about always getting paid by guys on the net, it seems that lying, cheating, and stealing isn't the exclusive domain of traditional porn companies.

Here's what I've been told: "The shit hit the fan in the last 24 hours for a bunch of these guys who run affiliates programs. I guess some webmaster managed to hack into an affiliate site and discovered the truth about 'shaving.' (A rip-off scam.)

Here's kinda how it works. You have a whole lot of people who put up these sites--many of them are but a single page of pics-- that are merely designed to drive traffic (i.e., surfers) to affiliates' sites. What's hoped for is that some of this traffic will convert to memberships. For every membership that comes from the driven traffic, the affiliates will pay a commission. Let's say some webgeek drives ten thousand surfers to an affiliate's site. Out of the the ten thousand, ten convert to memberships. The affiliate will then pay the person who drove the new members there a fee. This can sometimes be as much as a hundred dollars per new member.

But what happened last night was this-- the guy who hacked into the affiliate's site found databased proof of 'shaving,' or in laymen's terms, evidence that the affiliates are concealing the number of conversions that take place as a result of the traffic that passes through. Instead of paying on the ten conversions out of the ten thousand, they only pay on one or two.

The person who hacked into the affiliate site put up the hacked link on some message boards that all these smaller webmasters (the drivers of traffic) read. At the time of this writing, almost twelve thousand webgeeks have hit on the hacked link.

Needless to say, there's some pretty pissed off webgeeks out there.



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