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Excuse me for just a minute ... I think I just heard Steve collapse in his office next door. I had better go and revive him ... the poor man just can't stand the shock of me admitting that I was wrong.

Seriously though, it seems that I was wrong when I suggested that Cyber Monday wasn't going to be the big deal that many people were suggesting it would be. According to Comscore this year's Cyber Monday was the second biggest online spending day on record! It was even bigger than the entire weekend that preceded it by almost $80 million.

Unfortunately those big online sales figures still reflect a downturn in the economy because, while the figures were up for Cyber Monday, the figures for the period November 1 to December 1 were down by 2%.

Trust is important
One very interesting figure that I came across yesterday also has some bearing on us here in adult. It seems that while online sales have been down across the board the number of sales that have gone through PayPal rose by around 26 percent.

That would suggest that prospective buyers in these tough economic times are concerned about the perceived risk of buying from small online retailers that have their own merchant accounts. So instead of purchasing from those retailers online shoppers are looking for the safety that they feel PayPal offers.

Obviously PayPal is just not an option for many of the products that we sell ... although there are plenty of online stores selling sex toys that use PayPal as their payment gateway. That means that we're limited to the few payment options that are available to us but it also tells us something about what we need to be doing to encourage people to buy through the gateways that are available to us.

We need to be re-assuring the people that we're selling to that their personal details will be safe with us and that they're not going to be ripped off in any way. And stressing that safety is not something that should be left to the sponsor ... it's something that we should be doing at the free site level and perhaps even at the gallery level.

Sometimes all it may take is just a few words telling your surfers that they're credit card details are secure if they do buy what you're selling. At other times you may have to expand on those few words to stress the safety aspect.

Of course that can be a real pain ... after all it's much easier and quicker just to throw up a few banners isn't it? But sometimes, if you really want to make those sales happen for you then you just have to work that little bit harder and stroke the surfers that little bit more to encourage them to reach for their plastic.

When times get tough ...
... it seems that some people turn to spamming as their only hope of survival and we begin to see some very desperate attempts to make money.

If you wonder just how desperate some people can get then spare a thought for whoever it was that was spamming hookers in India multiple times on Google's Adsense help forum. If that isn't a sign of desperation then I don't know what is.

Let's face it, if you're going to spam in an attempt to make money would you really expect to get any return on your minimal investment in time by posting your spam on a Google forum? Not only are you going to get your bit of spam removed from the board but you're almost guaranteed to get the domain your using banned by Google quicker than you can blink your eyes ... so what's the point?

Apart from that you've also got to wonder about Google. How did they ever let anything like that through their filters without it raising some warning flags somewhere?

It seems that Google is relying on other forum users to report the abuse but you would think that something that was as blatant as that latest spammers efforts would alert someone before it even went live. Perhaps the reports that Google is laying off staff and cutting back on staff in non-productive areas is right. While Adsense/Adwords is still about the biggest revenue earner for Google moderating help forums is probably not seen as a high priority.

And now I must away and put in a few revenue raising hours of work myself. Steve is off to the dentist soon and that will probably wipe him out for the rest of the day. Why are big strong men such pussies when it comes to going to the dentist?