MasterCard Bans Cross Sales
 

From a post on GFY:
I hope VISA follows suit. Merry Christmas!

Great news indeed!

Back to revshare with ye!

Great news! Never liked them anyways, and I think they are one thing that make surfers really leery to sign up for porn.

MasterCard has always been more tough concerning e-commerce. Evidently it is good - the less lacunas in the laws - the easier to work for fair affiliate programs.

about time... I can't stand shady x sells, and can't wait to see all the BS programs who rely on them disappear.

Yep - good news! And hope other card companies follow that ruling!

The adult industry was never very good at controlling it's own problems. Time after time, when a small element of folks saw a loophole, became clouded by greed fantasies and could not resist over-stepping boundaries until legislation or other forms of enforcement terminated the practice. It's a quaint human tendency - a people thing :-)

On a number of occasions the introduction of enforcement has had other side effects and resulted in damaging legitimate webmasters or the market in general. The next 50 deviant ideas to earn a quick buck are probably in planning now. It will never end till the whole industry is screwed into the ground, wrapped up in volumes of legislation or other forms of enforcement and surfers consider paying for memberships to be on the same level as entering their card details on phishing websites.

Agree with you Gunner - the sooner these 'carding programs' disappear, the better!

And a very Happy Christmas all round! :-)

This was some nice news! However it will take some time before the damage is totally gone and people doesn't think twice about signing up on a porn site.

I'm glad of it.

It was getting ridiculous especially the prechecked cross sales below the join button.

Now if we can just do something about these illegal tube sites..

Ironically, this may help in that regard too. Along with the impending crash of AFF following the failure of their upcoming IPO.

Lemme 'splain...

Many of these illegal tubes are funded by a combination of high PPS sponsor programs and dating sites. AFF being the most prominent, and as far as I know the only one placing pre-paid ads on these illegal tubes.

The increased restrictions on cross-sales (as soon as Visa follows suit) will force these high PPS programs to reduce those payouts. AFF will likely survive the crash, but not without serious reorganization and some major payout changes of their own.

When AFF blinks their competition will follow and reduce their payouts too.

Bottom line, income for illegal tubes takes a big hit. A slim profit margin becomes even thinner.

I'm not going to name any names but I still see some prevalent PPS sponsors doing prechecked.

This leads me to believe that either they haven't gotten around to fixing it or they've had lawyers look it over and they're not worried about this for one reason or another.

Not to fall off topic..

but I still think the best thing for this industry is a revamping of the DMCA. Thats what most of these tube sites are hiding behind.

While the DMCA has its uses I feel that this is an abuse and DMCA needs to be updated for the times.

Pre-checked cross sales weren't what MC banned specifically. What they've done is enforce a policy banning the exchange of customer information with third parties. This effectively bans any cross-sale (checked or unchecked) with other programs not using a common IPSP such as CCBill or Epoch.

ok, now I understand

thats not going to help us much then is it? I mean doesn't almost every sponsor use those?

and if they don't wouldn't it be worth while to adopt those alternative forms of billing if the money is right?

No, most of the large sponsors are using multiple processing gateways as part of their cascading billing. Epoch and/or CCBill may be among them but they're usually not the primary since there are cheaper options that they can utilize with their own merchant accounts.

Also, CCBill and Epoch maintain far more control over the join forms.

Finally! A breathe of fresh air.

The one thing I worried about after reading and thinking about this was how it would effect AVS companies like SexKey and FNP that have pre-checked sales for their upsell sites. But since they own the company they are pre-checking, then I guess they are ok and fall within the rules. I don't do a lot of sites for them, but I'd hate to see them fold up like pro-adult and others before them. Fortunately, the company I sell the most for, doesn't do any cross sales. |thumb

I would assume that they're using the same processor for the AVS membership and the pre-check upsell, so that wouldn't violate the MC policy.

As far as I know they'd have to be different companies. You cannot cross sell the same company whereas the surfer would see 3 sales from companyname inc for example.

No idea why this was allowed for so long other then surfers are not as stupid as one would think (and the number of complaints on this issue were not that plentiful). Makes me think Mastercard just likes to throw its weight around from time to time ;o)

At least this time we are behind the decision but like has been mentioned, each time there is a change someone gets screwed over for some unrelated reason. I am Canadian so MasterVisa has not done me a good shake over the past 5 to 10 years.