Why do my download store stats show more downloads than viewers?
Your UMD stats show you how many people have downloaded each scene that you have in the store (DL's). It also shows you how many people actively have access to download content from each scene (viewers). You may notice that the number of downloads for any given scene is greater than the number of people who actually have access to it, causing some alarm. Here's an explanation.

The stats in the "viewers" column shows you how many people actively--as in right now--have access to that download. Their access lasts for 5 days then expires. So the number of viewers will fluctuate up and down as customer access to a download expires, and as you make more sales of that scene.

The DL's (downloads) column shows how many times, overall, that scene has been downloaded. Yes, 11 people can download a scene 22 times because they are allowed unlimited downloads of any particular scene for the 5 days they have access to it. (See the Webmaster Help page for info on how we go about security.) Any time a person downloads anything from a "scene," that hit counter is incremented. If one of your scenes has 5 videos and a zip file, and another scene only has one single video, then obviously the first scene's hit counter would go up more quickly, because it's incremented each time a person downloads any part of its package.

The downloads counter does not reset in the way the viewers one does. It just keeps going up as long as people buy and download stuff from that scene. And there are several reasons why a single person may download a scene more than once during his 5-day access to the scene. A lot of people download it to their computer then forget where it saved to, so they just download it again. Other people don't even have their computer set to save the video. When they click the download button, it just pops right up in their player, so if they want to play it again, they have to come back to the site and click the download button again. Also, I should note that the counter doesn't convey whether or not somebody successfully downloaded the whole file. Once UMD starts serving the file out, that counter goes up by one. If a person's connection craps out in the middle of a download (especially a large one) and they have to start over, that will register more hits on the DL's for that scene.

So please take that column as what it is--just something else to look at and give you a general sense of what is going on. It's perfectly legitimate for there to be multiple downloads of any scene by any given user. We give people all the instructions on how to save a file to their computer for later use, but everybody is not the most computer-literate. If you have security concerns, please note that we log every single download, and we can research any suspicious activity if you contact us to do so.


Why does the download store have a $10 minimum charge?
Simple answer: because UMD loses money on sales that total much less than $10.

We must pay a certain percentage of each sale to our credit card processor. The more or less a sale is, the higher and lower this fee is. But in addition to that, we also must pay a flat fee that stays the same no matter how much the sale is. If the total amount of the sale goes much lower than $10, then the flat fee that we have to pay eventually amounts to more than our take of the transaction.

Your $10 shopping cart total can be a mix of downloads from one or any number of producers.


Does the download store accept mastercard?
No. Our current billing processor cannot be affiliated with MasterCard to bill for adult sites that offer aggregated content (selling stuff from multiple producers in one place). We plan to accept MasterCard in the future, as soon as we can. Meanwhile, we accept Visa and Amex, plus you can pay directly from a regular bank account.


What will appear on my credit card statement when I buy a download?
You will see “AlertPay Inc.” and/or “Nicosia.” This name will appear beside the transaction on your credit/debit card statement along with AlertPay's customer support phone number.


Why does my "number of votes" go down?
On the Most Active Users page, we show the people who have rated the most items around the site, using the star ratings system. Those who have voted on the most stuff will appear in the top spots. But this only considers ratings cast in the past 30 days. Therefore, the number of votes that it shows for you may actually decrease as the days wear on unless you keep rating things. In other words, if you voted on 1000 items in the past few months, but only 200 of them were in the past 30 days, your number of votes will only show 200. So this is a rolling system where you must remain active to stay on top.


Why doesn't the download store accept muliple versions of the same content?
On the download store, it is possible to put multiple files together and sell them as a single download (we call it a "scene") where the customer gets all the files if they purchase it. Not only does this give the producer flexibility to offer disparate content together as a package, but it also is meant to reduce redundancy when the producer needs to offer various renditions of the same content.

If a producer wants to offer something in different formats, sizes, qualities, or edits, they must offer them together in a single package. Examples of content that must be packaged together are: an uncut video plus smaller cut-up clips of the same video; the same video in different formats; the same video in different sizes such as HD, normal resolution, and ipod resolution; a video accompanied by hi-res photos from the same scene.

The purpose is to eliminate redundancy on the storefront. Imagine going to a Blockbuster and they've got the same DVD on the shelf 50 times in various versions like wide-screen, Spanish, subtitled, and even on sale chapter-by-chapter. Not that our store is trying to be another Blockbuster or Netflix, but you can imagine the confusion of having the same thing on sale multiple times. When someone sees an entry on our store, it should be true, sovereign, independent content, not the same thing as the item next to it.


Why does the UMD seem to be more commercial than not?
This site is very liberal with what it allows users to post. The forum, site listings, and what's new section are free, and let site owners advertise their wares without many restrictions. As such, it's no wonder that we'd see tons of pictures and teasers and updates from these producers posted around the site.

We also do not really restrict the contents of postings and listings, provided that they have legal subject matter and abide by our simple guidelines. So you may see some adult sites (which tend to be pay-sites) listed alongside the more innocent stuff.

In keeping with our all-incusive nature, we list it all, so long as it's wam, and let the users decide what they want to check out.


What is UMD Premium?
Back when the forum Picture Archive was still new, it was obvious that hosting those tens of thousands of photos for absolutely free would eventually impact bandwidth and server performance. So UMD Premium was born to limit access to the older stuff while the newer content was still free.

Now, UMD Premium also offers access to all the archived dead Youtube videos in a Video Archive (which is also available on iWam.com to its members). Premium users can also download zip files of whole individual pages of Picture Archives. Premium users can see many more pictures and videos per page than regular users.

If you are a webmaster, UMD Premium allows all your sites to have galleries, and for your sites to show up in your forum signature. (Users always get galleries even if they aren't Premium.)

More benefits will be added to UMD Premium later.


When/why was the UMD started?
On May 3, 1998, the UMD started as a single black and white text file on the internet. It was nothing but a list of bookmarks to messy wrestling sites, messy picture finds, and whatever wam stuff that could be found around the internet. It was just a random offshoot of a music site, but without any advertisement whatsoever, it started getting hundreds of hits a day.

Along with the traffic came rave reviews which mostly complimented about the completeness and all-inclusiveness of the links. They weren't just links to pie-in-the-face sites, or just messy wrestling, or just nude or just clothed or free or pay. The UMD was linking to anything and everything that had any wam in it, whether it was a whole wam site, or just a picture or video or a story or even another directory.

A few months later, the UMD started including wetlook, and started a mission to link to everything on the internet that could be found, as long as it pertained to our working definition of wam, which is "the act of getting or watching someone get wet or messy in any non bodily-fluid substance."

Being the first wam directory and having the first wam chatroom and forum, wammers started finding each other and even meeting up. We've been doing social networking long before Facebook and Myspace!

Thanks to a very active community and moderators that help keep it all together, plus pioneer websites like Messyfun and Mudpuddle Visuals to link to, the UMD is still here over one decade later, and is showing no signs of stopping.


How do the ratings work?
The site-wide ratings system was designed to gauge community consensus about the value of everything that can be added by a user. You can rate photos, videos, forum posts, sites, and even site reviews. The system was built to be fair. You have to be logged in to vote, and you can only vote on each item once. It is a rolling ratings system, meaning only the latest X number of votes (currently 100) of any type, for any given item are considered, and older ones are forgotten. This allows an item's rating to change over time. For example, a site that used to be great and had high ratings may stop updating and start getting lower ratings, causing the old high ratings to eventually drop off the end. Or vice versa. Every item's rating is an average of the number of stars users gave it, which gives a level playing field for all items old and new.

We also have a separate scoring system which takes each item's user-rating and weighs it against how old that item is. Every day that passes, any item's score is weighed 1/30th less. When it's new, its score has 100% of its weight but after half a month its score is only worth half as much. Items over 30 days old are not considered at all. We use these date-weighted scores to determine the "top items" in any category such as hottest photos and forum threads, and even wammer of the day. So whatever is new, highly-rated, or both, will likely make the hot list in its section. The scores are also weighted by other factors such as the number of unique views the items have gotten, and any negative reports users have submitted on them. These scores are just relative, numerical indexes that we use internally, so they are not shown to the public. Remember that these scores are independent of and do not affect the star-ratings.

You cannot rate other users. However the site uses an algorithm that takes into account everything each user posts around the site. The user with the most highly-rated stuff, the most stuff, and the most recent stuff, gets pushed higher in the rankings. So the more you participate, and the better-rated all your stuff is, the higher your score gets. You might even become Wammer of the Day!

We have a backend that can see, globally, who is rating what. Anyone caught abusing or spamming the system will have all of his ratings removed, and will be banned from the ratings system.

The backend to this system is very complex and I will be tweaking it from time to time. So please don't take it too seriously. It's just meant to be fun and to encourage people to post great stuff.


What are credits for?
If you go to your profile and look on the left-hand side, you will see the current number of credits that your account has. You may purchase credits for your UMD account by clicking the Add link.

Credits are used on this site to fund your advertising campaigns. Once you have credits, you can set up ads by editing any site or download scene, scrolling near the bottom of the form, and uploading a banner and applying credits to the ads.


Do you offer monthly payouts for download store sales? Daily?
No. Currently, the entire UMD is only set up to make weekly payouts to all producers at the same time. This helps keep all accounting correct.

Weekly payouts do not much affect the amount that AlertPay charges for the transfers, because 2.5% of a weekly payout is the same as 2.5% of a monthly payout. The only difference is that they charge the flat rate of 25 cents ($.25) per transfer. So at most you are losing out on 75 cents a month for the convenience of getting weekly payouts instead of monthly ones.

Daily payouts are not offered either. Money from all sales is frozen for a week by our payment processor, and we cannot even access it to pay out to you until it is unfrozen. Also, it is safer for us to have a week's buffer to hold on to unfrozen funds so that we can handle unexpected problems such as chargebacks, payment glitches, etc.


Why are some of the ads so expensive?
They're not. Internet ads can range anywhere from 10 cents to 50 cents or more per click. Do some test phrases over at Google's own traffic estimator here to see what they charge. And their traffic isn't as targeted as umd's traffic because the umd is 100% wam-related. Virtually all traffic that our ads send out is dedicated wam-lovers. Our ads range from 1.5 cents to 5 cents depending on the ad location which is a fraction of the going rate.

Our ads charge per click. That means that credits are only deducted from your account when somebody actually clicks the ad. An ad can be shown to visitors many times and you'd never get charged a dime. This is obviously preferred by advertisers, instead the pay-per-impression schemes that charge you whether you actually got any traffic or not.

Ads in some sections of this site are shown many times a day but have a low clickthrough ratio, meaning it might be shown and seen hundreds of times before being clicked. Because of the brand recognition afforded by such a location, once such an ad is clicked, it will deduct more credits than an ad in a more highly-visible location. We provide extremely detailed numbers on all our ad locations so you can gauge the performance of your ads and determine whether it's cost effective for you to advertise there.


Why don't you add more _____ sites?
We can only list sites that exist. We don't give priority to listing any type of site based on its contents or pay status. So as long as it has some wam in it, we'll list it. If there happen to be more sites out there with a certain type of content or pay status, then our directory listings will most likely reflect that.


Why use my UMD download store when I already have one elsewhere?
There is nothing wrong with maximizing your exposure by having more than one store. Plus, consider the following points:

- We do not charge you any setup, hosting, or storage fees to put your content up for sale. There is no monthly requirement for you to add new content. So really, what is there to lose? You will only make additional revenue by having another store, especially one that's integrated into the UMD.

- UMD is like a mall, instead of a single store. Malls are great because people come to the mall to shop at a particular store, but end up visiting other stores that are there. This is incidental traffic to your store that you otherwise would not have gotten. Being on UMD among the other download stores allows you to get this extra traffic that you didn't even have to advertise for. What's even better is that the user can add your downloads to their shopping cart too, even if he already started shopping at another producer's store. The walls are all torn down! Of course you will also get your own unique store that only contains your downloads. You can even have multiple stores--one for each of your site listings, plus one for your user profile!

- UMD's own download store is the only one that is truly integrated with the UMD. Our pages are downloaded 150,000 times every day by true wammers, and your store is right in the middle of it all. Besides the actual advertising system, there is a ton of exposure for your stuff. Your download store will be mentioned on your forum signature, under your forum icon, on your user profile, on your site profile, and in the middle of the Picture Browser as relevant to pic browser searches! There are ad spots that you can't even buy, totally dedicated to downloads, on the forum, Vid Archive, and Pic Browser sidebars. There is a "users also bought" feature right on the checkout page, and a "related downloads" section on each user's My Downloads area--all there to promote your content. UMD's email subscribers will even get a notice automatically when you add a new download (and you can even delay your release date). All of this is free and automatic, and happens simply by you adding scenes to your download store! And the main attraction--the Downloads page itself--is extremely popular, and mentions the newest and hottest downloads and models.

- We give tons of control to producers for their stores. UMD automatically pulls vidcap frames from your videos--one every 5 seconds--then lets you choose which ones to keep. You can pack multiple videos and zip files into a single download, or sell them individually. You can supply a teaser trailer and a free photo gallery for each scene. We let you download a zip file of all generated vidcaps, and there is a watermarking utility to tag all your vidcaps and gallery photos with your own logo. You can set a future release date for each of your downloads, and they will automatically show up in what's new and on the store at that time, plus UMD email list subscribers will get the notice of your scene at that time! Don't forget our Models Roster, to which you can add all of your models' bios which will automatically link to all the scenes they're in. We give you extensive statistics and bar graphs, so you know how your sales are progressing, and how many people have access to your content at any given time. Best of all, we pay you weekly by transferring your payment directly to your AlertPay account.

The way we see it, there is no disadvantage to having a UMD download store, even if you already have another, but there are tons of reasons to have one. Best of all, your store is already set up and ready to go. Just click on "Add New Scene" from your profile, and upload some content to it!


After I remove my UMD account, how do I remove my search results from Google?
Google indexes UMD's pages, and even if you've removed your UMD account and forum posts, those pages and posts may still show up on Google searches and in their cache.

It will only be a matter of days before Google learns that the pages containing your old info are now gone, and Google (and other search engines) will remove them automatically.

If it is super-urgent that you get them removed, first remove your account from UMD and alert us that you want old forum messages and any other content removed as well. Then we will use Google's urgent removal tool to delete any offending pages from their index.