For those who weren't around at the time, the story goes that Epoch was stupid enough to pay Cybersocket $100,000 or some huge sum a couple years ago when they wanted to make a big splash in the gay marketplace, under the misguided notion that Cybersocket could enhance their reputation among gay webmasters and bring Epoch business.

Cybersocket's method of enhancing Epoch's reputation was allegedly to pressure AVN to schedule their competing gay show directly against the time the Gay Phoenix Forum was scheduled, and set up Epoch as the exclusive sponsor of the event, and encourage key sponsors to go to CCBill and tell them they wouldn't sponsor GPF, thereby forcing cancellation of GPF... and preventing CCBill from being able to sponsor the one remaining event.

I don't think Epoch had any idea of the shady stuff going on, but the result was a huge backlash against Epoch by gay webmasters, which was the complete opposite of what Cybersocket was to have provided. Epoch, probably realizing that the whole thing was a huge clusterfuck, eventually gave up the exclusivity they'd presumably paid extra for, and considerably toned down their presence at the event, allowing CCBill to also sponsor and contribute, AVN came away with a pretty big black eye as well, and that was, I think, the beginning of many people realizing just exactly what Cybersocket really was.

Assuming Epoch is the processor with the free ads in Cybersocket, I could easily see that perhaps Cybersocket is trying to win favor again with Epoch.

I should hope that Epoch would see through that.