Well technically, shaving is not crediting a referring webmaster with a sale. That means if you have an exit console and my surfer didn't buy your site's membership, but he bought one off your exit console and I didn't get a cut - you shaved. I didn't send my traffic to Hairy Ass Fuckers so they could sell that traffic a membership to Hairy Cock Suckers, owned by someone else.

And I hate exit consoles that pop on top of the intended site.

I hear what people are saying about site owners having to manage the mechanics of $30 PPS. But in their greed to take the money and run, what most webmasters don't understand is that if you're promoting though a PPS program, you're most certainly being shaved.

One well-known program that I promote didn't seem to be doing so well in the rebill department, so I switched all my revshare codes to PPS. Suddenly my conversion rate went from 1/300 to 1/600, 1/700, and 1/800. Coincidence? Perhaps, but when I changed my codes back to revshare my conversion rates went back to what they were.

And if your sponsor is using a NATS or MPA3-type program, there's heaps of opportunities to shave. They don't call it shaving, but from the NATS demo I saw in Vegas, you can set up all kinds of perameters that result in the sponsor making as much as money as possible and the referrer not necessarily getting everything that's coming to them.

And I'm sure that as transactions fall through the cascading referral information falls away at times. If Microsoft can't make an operating system that doesn't need to be restarted and burped several times a day that cascading software doesn't hiccup occasionally.

If a sponsor is selling DVDs on their site and only giving wm's credit on memberships, that's shaving. If they have banners for other paysites, that's shaving. If they have traffic leaks to their own link lists and blogs and TGPs, that's shaving.

Absolutely 99% of sites in this business shave. It's just that we've come to accept some of the practices as benign and we've stop calling them shaving.

Cheers
Michael