It's funny how things turn around. It's odd how something once despised might become the best solution to a possibly impending problem. What if VISA cut the cord?

"If you're a paysite owner or thinking about becoming one you really should offer the dialer option to your potential members."

After all they seem to be exacting ever changing, ever more acrimonious compliance standards upon (primarily) our industry. Their %1 chargeback threshold -mandated recently- is another straw in a big big bundle we bear for the privilege of processing Internet credit card payments. VISA claims the "High Risk Merchant" classification is applied to all that process through third-party billers on the web. They tell us of the vast losses they've suffered because of fraudulent cyber transactions.

Yet, when VISA speaks of fraud, we adult webmasters collectively cringe. We know what brick-and-mortar merchants have known for years. VISA is good to customers but not so good to merchants. If a cardholder loses a charge dispute they have to pay what they owe. If a regular merchant account holder loses a dispute, that chargeback is recorded.

If the merchant account holder exceeds a stated percentage of chargebacks, they're financially penalized and might have their assets frozen. The chargeback penalty is steep. I would venture to guess those penalties might be at least more than %100 the worth of actual aggregated cardholder purchases. In other words, VISA sure collects a hell of a lot of money in chargeback penalties from adult Internet merchant accounts.

That's why third party billers were invented. It's possible to get a regular merchant account for an adult web business but it ain't easy.

One has to partner with a lending bank plus shell out a healthy merchant account fee. Third party billers acted as paid intermediaries between adult webmasters and the VISA/lender contingent. Third party billers held the merchant accounts and would "sublet" payment access services out to smaller Internet porn providers. Third party billers allowed a lot of people to open and profit from a web-based business. Were it not for the third-party billing system a good many of us would never have been able to process credit card payments on the net.

Credit cards aren't the only way to take payments through the web but they are definitely the most popular method among surfers. Credits cards go great with impulse products -of which cyberporn is the ultimate.

We've always had other options but they were complicated and time consuming. The only other viable Internet payment system for adult webmasters without merchant accounts was PayPal. They crapped out on us this last year. American Express ditched adult payments ages ago. Online checking has hope but is replete of the ease of CCs. And seriously, who the hell mails out a money in order to join a paysite?

If VISA puts the kibosh on processing for Internet porn, the only truly hopeful avenue adult merchants can look to has a bad reputation: That avenue is the infamous Dialer.

The dialer came about as an alternative answer for surfers without credit cards. The Internet works through the phone line and the phone companies are already set up to charge and process payments on a mass scale.

If people could access Internet porn and have the fee charged to their phone bill, processing would be virtually similar to already existing 1-900 services. The dialer was an executable program, which (after installed) dialed up a connection to the server of the porn provider with a specified phone number. A dialer customer paid their fees through their phone bill. No credit card needed.

Unfortunately, dialers were also easy to abuse initially. Some boneheads set their dialers up so that the access numbers were long-distance, therefore more costly to the customer. Some resellers of the original dialer programs abused the executable format of the software. They configured the dialers so they would auto-download and self-install.

Early customers were unaware they were being charged ungodly fees for modem access until they received their phone bills a month after they got a dialer. Misleading sales promises, secretive code and outright fraud were all crimes committed by early dialer affiliates.

That was then. This is now. The bad dialer providers and affiliates were pretty much weeded out and punished appropriately. Now dialers have to tow the line. Now practically all the big adult sponsors offer a dialer program to affiliates. If you're a paysite owner or thinking about becoming one you really should offer the dialer option to your potential members. Not only would you enable non-CC clients to view your product, you'd have a fail-safe if the whole credit card thing went away.

The good thing is the dialer option never went away and there are billing services which will enable you to offer such an option to your new members:

GoodThinxx
(http://www.goodthinxx.com)
Bill the World with GoodThinkxx. Another advantage of incorporating dialer-based billing into your paysite is you reach a wider client base. Many Europeans don't have credit cards and therefore are unable to access US-based content. GoodThinkxx dialer will help resolve that problem. Sell your own content or theirs. Either way you'll sell to more.

NoCreditCard
(http://webmaster.nocreditcard.com)
Your paysite members can connect -via dialer- through a modem, ISDN, DSL Cable modem and even their Web TV. Promote their stable of webcam chats or use your own content. Members may access either through a self-installing dialer or their PhoneCenter option.