Looking to squelch speculation that hit the Adult webmaster message board community over the past few days, Epoch Transaction Systems says they are not pulling away from cross-sells as a whole. They have, however, canceled a very small pocket of cross-sell options for a very small pocket of clients.
"It's very simple," chief executive Chris Mallick told AVNOnline.com October 25. "Our position is this: We are not canceling, doing away with, or considering doing away with, or terminating cross sells across the board. We did notify a very, very small number of programs, that are clients, that [their] programs can no longer do pre-checked cross sells."
Mallick said it was purely a risk management decision specific to that small number of client programs. "There are elements of risk in the type of sites they're selling or in the way in which they're getting traffic," he said. Mallick declined to specify the site types or traffic gathering ways in question, saying the programs themselves would probably be better off not disclosing publicly their discussions with Epoch about those sites and methods.
But Mallick reiterated sharply that this does not equal anything close to a complete withdrawal from cross sells, especially since Epoch has been doing cross sells successfully for three years.
"Our large clients know that this is not a wholesale decision, it is not a company wide decision, this is not anything we're contemplating for variety of reasons," he said. "One, it's an effective billing model, it does not present additional risk of chargeback, and it's just been portrayed [as that risk by] people who don't understand the model, don't know how to build the model, or don't have the risk tolerance we have in our portfolio.
"We've been doing cross sells for three years, and our numbers are better than they've ever been," he added, "and we see no reason why we should not help our clients make as much money as possible."
