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I've just been wandering around one of the adult industry's leading message boards and following a few threads on signups, scrubbing and ratios. It's certainly been interesting because some things have changed and some things have very definitely stayed the same.

As always people are concerned about how their traffic is converting and which programs are going to convert better than others. That really is a bread-and-butter issue and webmasters are going to be talking about it forever. Affiliates over in mainstream are no different either ... they too watch their conversion figures carefully because it's what ultimately pays the bills and puts food on our tables.

For adult webmasters part of that discussion has always centered on which billing companies seem to be able to process more signups and which ones are scrubbing harder. Right now there are a lot of people complaining about CCBill and how poorly the traffic going to paysites that use CCBill is converting.

The fact that CCBill is involved doesn't surprise me either for there have been periods of time going back over the years when getting a signup accepted through CCBill was almost as hard as winning the lottery ... and I'm saying that from an affiliate's point of view and a paysite owner's point of view.

Of course when times like that arise and CCBill is involved the official line is always the same ... "nothing has changed and everything is working fine" and that may be the case but eventually it becomes harder to believe that everything is as per normal. It also becomes increasingly obvious that CCBill has raised their scrubbing limits for some reason that they don't want to talk about.

On the one hand that's not a bad thing. CCBill is protecting its own position and making sure that it doesn't run foul of the credit card companies' charge-back limits. If they were to be zapped by the credit card companies that would be a major blow to the industry and a lot of small paysites ... and plenty of affiliates too ... would lose their income.

On the other hand when scrubbing is pushed into overdrive affiliates and small paysite owners suffer almost as much. With no money coming in because CCBill is canning all the potential signups paysite owners are going to struggle to keep their paysites going and affiliates are going to go looking for sponsors who can accept signups.

So it's a bit of a Catch 22 situation that's really not going to satisfy anyone and you have to wonder why some of the other billing companies don't seem to have the same problems. Of course some do have periods when it's obvious that they're scrubbing harder but there are some who don't.

Yes it really is a situation where no one is really going to win and the best any affiliate can hope for is that the paysites that he or she is sending all their traffic to is billing through a company that's not scrubbing everyone.

So if problems with billing companies scrubbing away almost every sale is something that's been around for years so what this that's changed?

Sadly for affiliates it seems that ratios have taken a real dive in the last year or so and I suppose that's only to be expected. The financial situation is still not good and there have been a few hints in the last couple of days that it might even be about to get worse.

There's even more free porn around than ever before and controlling the theft of content seems to still be a hopeless task so I guess that ratios should be in the toilet ... but not to the extent that some people are quoting.

It doesn't seem all that long ago that a ratio of 1:250 was about average and 1:100 was good but now I'm seeing people talk of ratios like 1:5000 and one affiliate was complaining that he'd sent a whole lot more than that to a couple of sponsors and had no signups at all.

Times are certainly tougher than they once were but that's no reason not to jump into this industry. When times are tough like they are right now you're going to learn a whole lot more about the art of making a sale than you ever would when times are good and signups are easier to come by.

If you can succeed now then you can succeed even more when times are good so perhaps now really is the best time to make a start as an adult webmaster. You won't know until you try.