I’ll compose a detailed breakdown and share my tea in hopes to keep awareness alive - not let this info fade away - and that you’ll share the concept at your own campfires.
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Keep in mind when the meltdown happened, I was bb and the majority of moving parts and threats were happening behind closed doors. The details are gray, but this is what went public for the most part...
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Membership/Pay sites were *the* money, that's how you earned income - you either owned a pay site and offered an Affiliate or RevShare program - often a 50/50 split - or you were an affiliate of these pay sites, earning your commission by sending sign-ups to the pay sites.
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The bigger and badder the membership site + an attractive affiliate program = the more affiliates would accrue. Barrels of money. (gorgeous membership website packed with regular HQ updates plus a reputable affiliate program - everyone wanted to be an affiliate for that site.)
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Though being an affiliate was hard work, it was not as difficult as running monster paysites - meaning: tons of affiliates vs not very many really big paysites with affiliate programs that had decent payouts. People fed their families by being affiliates, it put food on tables.
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Then it happened.
It is rumored that it either started with a disgruntled employee that saw The Cheat Scripts (de's bring the tea), or a savvy affiliate with a sassy gray hat picked up on the algorithms being used by less savvy affiliate progs (rounded amounts, set times).Show this thread -
Overnight the screen shots were posted, instant viral before viral was a thing. (I made a shitty visual representation, keep reading)
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Basically, there were affiliate management scripts you could buy off the shelf that had BUILT IN SKIMMING INPUTS (aka "shaving") and the sites using these scripts got outed in the biggest of ways. Vindication for already suspected behaviors, feeding frenzy ensued.
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Example: a paysite affiliate program could hold back (shave) 1%-100% of an individual affiliate's sales from 11:30pm to 3:12am when the drunky-fappies stumbled back home with their raging bar boners... and the affiliate would never be the wiser. See shitty visual representation:pic.twitter.com/vr2bUcpjuQ
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You can imagine the fall out, and I mean it when I say death threats were flying. Million$ were involved. Sites shut down, people left the industry, shady people cleaned up their act (for awhile at least) and conversations about the practice of shaving faded away.
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Am I saying there are websites and platforms currently shaving or skimming transactions (clip sales, for example) from producers and artists right now? No, I know of nothing personally. But I totally *am* saying it would be foolish to remain naive about such possibilities.
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If/when another reveal like that happens I doubt it will be as neatly wrapped up with a tidy bow (eg. screen shots of blatant script inputs) but it will be messy and producers will suffer. Prep you and your biz. Eyeball everything. Track everything. Spread your eggs. Fin.
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End of conversation
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Hypnosis Ingenium
to keep awareness alive about the *decades old industry practice of “shaving” wherein platforms don’t report all of your transactions to you... like, daily.
*technically skimming off the top is centuries old, but you get my point.