Matt Richtel and John Schwartz report on changes to the credit card association rules enacted last week that apply to so-called “high risk” merchants.
Visa will charge its member banks a $500 registration fee and an annual renewal fee of $250 for each high-risk company they pay a credit-card charge to. Those fees will be passed on, with a markup, to the sites themselves. MasterCard is expected to roll out similar fees, industry analysts say. The sums are insignificant to larger sites, but could well drive smaller sites into the red; tens of thousands of adult sites are home-grown entities, industry experts say.