Hello everyone,
First, sorry for the delay in answering here - we had no CMD account to post after we’ve heard of the concerns being expressed here. We created one but learned this is a part of the forum where only females are allowed to post, then created another one.
This first message is from Gérald and following messages will be from Ally who handles most of CMD support - so to respect the forum’s rules. Additionally, Ally will check this thread every few days in case of new questions (please remember that Skype &
[email protected] remain the medium for support).
The following concerns are addressed below, in case you’d like to scroll directly:
-ACH payouts being late
-ACH overpayments
-FirstchoicePay & GBT
-Temporary site slowness
-More traffic
ACH payouts being late
This is my bad: when talking with Mark in order to pick up CMD’s routines, note them down, and execute them so that the acquisition would not bring any change to habits developed in the last few years I understood that ACH payouts were issued on Monday.
Therefore, we issued ACH payouts every Monday for 4 weeks thinking we were doing it just right (especially when nobody complained). Then we learned reading here that ACH payouts were actually being issued on Fridays so that they arrive by Monday.
We have since then changed the payout issuance back to Fridays, I do hope everyone receive their earnings today.
It was not our intention to delay or otherwise change the date of ACH payouts. The only payout date we changed is for FirstChoicePay - from Sundays to Fridays (2 days earlier).
ACH overpayments
This is my bad as well. I used a new process which took the wrong values and did not notice, therefore everyone got paid the sales amount (what the customer pays) instead of the earnings amount (sales amount minus CMD fees).
The overpayment will be offset against future payouts, meaning we will deduct earnings from your future payouts until you have been paid out just the right amount for your sales.
Everyone impacted has received an email today stating how much they were overpaid, and whether they’d like their next payout to be reduced from this week or the one after.
Please note that in order to seize this 1 week additional delay, it is necessary to contact
[email protected] by Thursday evening.
Also, the overpaid amount can no longer be seen from your admin panel - it’s been removed urgently on Friday after noticing it was impacting site ranking.
FirstChoicePay & GBT
CMD used to have an older type of FirstChoicePay wallet, with the Global Bank Transfer feature enabled. This was the favorite payout method of 15 - 20 models.
When we noticed that feature was missing from our own wallet, we immediately contacted Payoneer. We got told that this was no longer available to adult companies, and that CMD had essentially been lucky for getting to keep it after it’s been deprecated.
Since then, we’ve learned (thanks to SW again!) that Streamate had it - and Streamate is definitely too big to “be lucky”. Therefore we asked Payoneer again, in a more insistent way, and learned this feature was currently only awarded to adult businesses on an “I like you” basis.
We’re trying our best to have it as well since then.
Temporary site slowness
Many noticed that CMD had some temporary technical issues in the past few weeks, being slow sometime for periods ranging from a few seconds to an hour. We’ve counted 7 events in 5 weeks, but there might have been a few more.
Firstly, I’d like to reassure everyone that we have not changed how CMD operates technically - for now we’ve kept the same code, on the same servers, at the same hosting company.
What happened is the following:
-Some bots from China were opening many concurrent connections on the site at times, slowing it down considerably. This happened a couple times prior to the acquisition as well.
-We doubled the servers’ CPU and RAM in order to temporary resolve the problem, and followed the hosting company’s recommendations to upgrade servers’ operating systems to better block the bots.
-While implementing the upgrades, the hosting company made - several times - manipulations which slowed the site down (we only learned about this recently and at the time had no idea what was going on).
-The new OS is now installed and the bot issue resolved (so far).
-However, this weekend, the hosting company got issues with a faulty device which was replaced on Sunday. It slowed the site again for some time.
This is not to say this is not our fault, but simply to exhibit that this issue is unrelated to CMD’s acquisition. We will change hosting company as soon as possible, we cannot tolerate so many issues in such a small time frame.
More traffic
Many people hope for more traffic following the acquisition, and we certainly hope that we will be able to grow CMD’s customer base as well.
For now, we’re focused on having CMD & IndieBill operated as smoothly as possible . However, we have hired a marketing agency specialized in AdWords campaigns (purchasing traffic on Google).
Since last week, they’re experimenting with a $100 / day budget to purchase traffic for CMD and we’re tracking the results.
We do not know yet if we will be able to purchase traffic profitably like this because CMD’s margin per transaction is pretty low compared to sites like LiveJasmin or Streamate. We’re giving it a try though, and if it works out we’ll increase the daily budget tenfold.
A few additions
I am sincerely sorry for the issues which happened and take full responsibility for those.
We are not the best, the biggest, the fastest or any other superlatives. We’re a small bunch of young & genuine people trying to build a great toolchain for independent entrepreneurs in the adult industry.
We believe the cut taken by most sites of the industry is disproportionate for the services they provide. So we’d like to shake things up a little bit and build fairer alternatives.
In the last 6 months we’ve evolved from a basically 1 man operation working from his kitchen, to a small team of 7 operating both CMD & IndieBill. We’re not always doing as great of a job as we’d like, but we’re on your side and you can count on us to rectify any mistakes to the best of our ability.
Please know that you are welcome to add me on Skype (billoirgerald) if you’d like to give some feedback (by chat or talking directly if you prefer) or are concerned about anything.
Kind regards,
Gérald
Ahh, you are sooo sweet. Thank you soooo much for the details & apologies. That means a lot to me. :)
A few things:
1. Wow, good to know about FC. I went thru hell with them & Skye Private. Now I know they are unethical if they play favorites. :(
2. I have noticed more traffic (for me anyway) & more sessions, until this past week when all I've gotten are time wasters & FLs. Is that already from the PPC? I came on here to bitch about how I've gotten min. 4 of them in the last 24 hours. LOL
3. Does Google allow your kws? I thought they ditched all adult, but maybe that's just my other adult industry.
4. Are you sticking with the new MID Mark got or moving it over to your Indie MID? I ask b/c there were a lot of restrictions put on what we could say in our profiles. It would be great if we could open that up again. :)
5. I used to get upset that I was logged out soooo often, but in the last 2 weeks I've been logged in continuously, so I hope you fixed whatever the problem is :)
5b) this also caused an issue where I would appear to be logged in, but I really wasn't b/c if I went to one of my profile pages, it would show I was offline even though the dashboard page still showed I was logged in. I was constantly refreshing just to make sure I was logged in.
I wrote about this at least 3 times & no one cared, so I'm hoping this is fixed now.
I'm glad your company is growing & TTYL Gerald :)