Poor Traffic Or Poor Programs?
 

From today's Newsletter

Poor Traffic Or Poor Programs?
I haven't bitched about anything in a few weeks, so I think I'm due :)
I've been in the business since 1996 & I think I have built up my websites to a nice level as far as my
quality of traffic is concerned. Until last week, I had never been forced by a program to switch from
Per Sign Up to Recurring because of poor conversions on trial memberships or Chargebacks/Credits.
While I agree 100% with the program that if I am costing the program money by them paying me Per
Sign Up, actions should be taken. But, this does also bring up the question "Are these sites we are
promoting any good in the 1st place?" I look at my job as a webmaster to send traffic to the
sponsors paysite & convince them before they get there to buy a membership (whether it's a trial or a
monthly or whatever) I feel it is my job to get the surfer to your site & the sponsors job to keep them
there.
Needless to say, if I was not doing well on their Per Sign Up Programs, that there's no way in hell I'm
going to use their Recurring Program - LOL So you'll excuse me while I pull a few links :)
Questions or comments on this?

I think a lot of it is poor programs that aren't kept fresh. The surfers go in and say seen this been there, nothing to see here, move along.

I've seen a few sponsors come and go. I personally think that policy stinks! This same thing happened to me with my first adult sponsor. I dropped them and never went back, and they are one of the biggest in the biz.

In the what goes around comes around category: This same sponsor (a year later) submitted to my sites for years with their galleries which I never listed. They didn't know that I knew who they were. :D

Sounds like a case of nothing in the backends of the sites :(

I don't think I've been forced to move over yet by any sponsor but I do think you have valid comments there GreenGuy.

It's our jobs as webmasters to filter the traffic to the sponsors who will make us the most money for our time and effort.

It's clearly the sponsors job to convert and retain the traffic by providing content of some worth to the surfer on a continual basis so that the sponsor can try and recover their costs. If the surfers cancel before the trial or only stay a month then the sponsor should perhaps take a second look at their sites in question and ask why?

I'm sure all these cookie cutter paysites aren't helping them one little bit either.

I had the same thing happen to me with a sponsor. I didn't pull links, just didn't add any new ones... I did get 1 recurring sign-up after that though that lasted like 6 months...

A sponsor canned my account about 5 months ago. I was pissed off because they kept my last check. I joined one of their sites and saw the reason the people would cancel. They promise the world and give you shit inside. Lots of pictures that I saw a few years back already, shitty quality, 10 - 20 sec movie clips. To see live shows you must join another program. They are still one of the largest programs around. And to cancell my menbership guess what, cannot find server error on the day I tried.

Sponsor Crap
 

I agree too. Some of the sponsors are cranking up new sites at the drop of a hat. There's no way they can provide enough unique content to keep a surfer interested for very long.

When I first started in this business I had a sponsor send me a ton of content and then just about the time I had created several sites using their content, they dropped the whole webmaster program!#$%$#&***

Just had another sponsor do the same thing - they have just dissapeared!|pissed|

ewriter

ewriter
I merged your reply into this thread so that we don't end up with two threads on the same subject.

My theory is the same. They liked the tour good enough to signup so now the inside better be good or you'll lose more than you should. Not our fault as webmasters!

The other side is the webmaster who lies about the site and links to the join page directly but programs can search that out easily enough on accounts that get flagged for poor conversions and chargebacks. Which is clearly not the case in Greenguy's situation. They take the tour, they signup...now it's up to you as a paysite owner to keep them!

Towards the end of last year I was dropped by a major sponsor because of a "credit/chargeback to transaction problem". Too many people were cancelling, apparently. The sponsor was offering "free trials" at the time.

Some weeks later another sponsor (one of my favourites) moved me from a "free trial" programme because too many of my signups were cancelling.

I'm a straight up sort of person. No hidden dimensions. No deception. What you read is what you get.

I promote their sites on a per signup basis. If their sites don't retain members, it's really not my problem.

i think you will see a lot of sponsors either go under or to rev share

and i been in a few pay sites and they want to sell you more shit when they should be doing things to keep you there

eman - That sort of thing drives me batty. If a site is offering a free sign up, they have to expect that a lot of people are going to sign up & cancel right away. A run of the mill site is not going to convince people to stick around, especially those who sought out the free membership in the first place.

I'd rather see a program charging for the trial instead of dropping webmasters.

I'm still not ready to name the sponsors yet, but I did go & peek at my stats for each & to me, they look pretty damn good:

Sponsor #1 - 1808 hits - 14 Sign Ups - 1:129 Ratio
Sponsor #2 - 5807 hits - 40 Signups - 1:145 Ratio

Looking at those numbers, I would have thought there was nothing wrong at all.

Both sponsors use the same stats program too, which is kinda strange.

...and both of them were going to be included in the next edition of my stats, but not anymore!

greenguy is that for the month or week or what

also when a sponsor gets out of line greenguy and jims webmaster board should show the power they have LOL

Those are my overall totals for each program - I haven't been using either one for too long (maybe a few months)

When I grow up I want stats like the Greenguy. :D

I agree totally! There is nothing unusual in those numbers. If it were me I would just pull their links and move on.

Stats
 

I'm like Cleo! What do these sponsors expect?

I suppose that the sponsors could just do away with us webmasters and promote their sites on their own by hiring a full time person to do nothing but link them, but a lot of the link site owners are webmasters trying to make some $$$ by promoting sponsors sites. What would happen if all of us webmasters finally got discouraged and got out of the business?

No, like it's already been said - its up to the sponsor to keep the surfer interested enough to keep re-newing their membership by having and adding quality product on a regular basis.

I can think of several sites that I joined in the past and stayed with for 6 months or longer because of their content.

ewriter

GG - I assume the problem is trial to membership ratio, or chargebacks. But, as you say, that is for the sponsor to improve on, not the webmaster. Also, maybe sponsors should show us those ratios in our stats.

Edit - DUH! You said that to begin with. But as you say, how were you to know there was a problem with that?

After removing at least 100 links today. I'm not really in a good mood... lol

But GG is right, All Mark's links, and my free sites, are a traffic pump. Nothing blind, nothing deceptive.
I send them to YOU (name sponsor here)

Sponsors listen up - if you are experiencing abnormal chargebacks, surf your own damn site. Compared against the other thousands of paysites out there, why is yours better?
Upsells are fine, but if I pay 30.00 or whatever, then give me what the tour said.

Hmmm - just thought of something.
When a paysite becomes a Real Job, maybe paysite owners become Business People, and forget how they surfed?

A lot of sponsors have nothing in the inside of their sites

in fact a lot of the major programs have almost nothing inside the sites

and if you speak to some of these poeple they act like charging 39.95 is to cheap

on the other hand there are a lot of professanal surfers out there
who use tgps daily and know how trials memberships work and they know how to cancel them

years ago when the web was new EVERYBODY was stupid.
but like everything else our customers learn how stuff works and are just trying to get the most for their money

I hate not to be towing the party line here, but I think we need to be careful. Those numbers show signup ratios not retention, upsells, cross sales or any other income that the site would have gotten, and if the sponsor was making a loss on the per-signup then do you blame them for converting to revshare ?

I have worked with a couple of programs of various sizes, and now own my own private one, and you would be amazed at what some webmasters will do for an extra $. After a few cases of webmasters signing up on multiple cards then charging back, linking straight to the join page from a page of false promise, coaching the surfer on how to cancel on a free trial, and more you can get kinda weary.

Now .... that being said ... if you cant support a $30 per signup model on greenguy's traffic then you should take a long hard look at your member's area. :)

These programs need to be revised... new owners of paysites can not survive with a new site and limited cash to promote it.
Somehow we need to still promote these sites to offer competition and growth into new areas and ideas within the adult industry. Like one person said "a little piss is good" also for all of us in this matter. We all can not promote the big guys who can afford to offer free trials and payouts to webmasters, so we need to figure out a way to get these smaller sites going and keep us happy as well.
We can not retain members, sponsors can, we can only give them the traffic to the site, the rest is up to them.

Yea good reading with all the replys

traffic is so hard to get and keep and when you send traffic that signs up, Then the sponsors piss about people that cancels..

Id Tell the mother fucker to work on keeping the surfers that join happy

instead they try and bleed more money out of them, offer less than advertised, shitty video and so on , And no shit they cancel

The biggest pain is not being able to control the surfer once he's joined since 98% of the time we don't know who it is, the same with normal sponsor sites, and if your sponsor site is crappy on the inside with limited content, nothing unique, then the retention rate is even lower. And sponsors need to recognize that once they are in the door, it's their responsibility to retain them, upsell them, cross sell them and suck that money out of their wallet like Jenna sucks a .............
......uh uh...
.....banana... |bananna| |bananna| |bananna|


for me, who mostly promotes Live Cam, i prefer rev-share because if i send quality traffic, we both make money. One of the sites i promote pays either 50.00 per sign up,or 25% of Rev, so my average sign-up has paid me over 171.71 each over the last year with my ratio 1:337. Not the greatest but not bad either.

however what i promote is unique, ever changing 'content' and i know that if a guy clicks through and joins one of my sites he is specifically looking for that host, and its up to HER to get him to video and retain him. I spend endless hours in our forum, and on line coaching, motivating, shepherding, etc..but truthfully, for us, it does pay off.

If i had to rely on pay per join, i'd probably get a 2nd job at 7-11.

I had one sponsor drop me about a year ago, saying there were too many chargebacks...but they never responded when I asked to see some statistics!

I just removed all their links and moved on - there are a lot of sponsors out there!

In addition to agreeing with most here - the most important problem I see is that new sponsors think they have to push a pay per sale model from the beginning - something that anyone who has been around for a while will tell you is BS - and not a good way to stay in business. While it may get you good traffic from the start from people like the LL owners etc. it cannot be done without something already in place to ensure that the freesignups/cancels still make you money (yes there are plenty of ways) which most paysites starting out don't understand.

With Google how it's been recently, I am very glad of recurring. But this is usually generated from sites who add new and exclusive content, regularly.

This is pretty funny - I just got an email from one of the programs stating they are lowering payouts on the Per Signup program from whatever it was ($35 I think) to $30

This email also plugs their other program, which is the other program I got tossed out of - LOL

Please email the urls of what you were using to get those sign-up. I'll use them until they kick me out. LMAO|bananna|

Seeing as they were both programs that I recently started to use, all the traffic was from link-o-rama.com

...and no, you can't use those pages :D

#1 YES, you are probably WAY overdue for a good bitch GG
and this is surely a good one.

It hasn't happened to Me recently, but it happened 2 Me
about 3 years ago. And now it's THERE loss.

I was on a great (pay-per) program and doin' decent with it.
THEN.... as u have said (out of the realm) I get an email that
says (we are converting u to a pay-per-active).

To set up this I want to ad that I had just (one week before) talked to My rep and I was going to convert many sites to this program cause it was ROCK'n ( or I thought).

So they still converted Me and I went on the rampage of changin' sponsors.

Lo and behold....
I found a great $25 per that worked
out for Me better than the other anyway.

Is there a point?
Probably not... other than sponsors are strugglin'
to cover expenses and realms they never should have
persued to start with.

I still laugh today because THAT sponsor was (so to speak) a main player back in the day and now they are hard 2 find.

But I credit them for giving Me a very good learing experiece.
Which is what this biz is about.

I was with a sponsor a few years back that changed their whole system from Per Sign up to recurring cause people weren't keeping their membership longer than the Trial period, I tried their trial period and then let the membership go for another month, the site was NEVER updated, I quickly changed to a different company in the same area and did wonderfuly. Companies that are trying to get people to sell their site should update regularly.

so to sum it up it's their fault!

regards
garv

I just had the same exact problem. Got switched to recurring because there sites sucked and they couldnt keep a member.

Hi Frank!! Good to see ya!

i was pushing one sponsor a bit more for foreing traffic because i did good and they pay in euros (i am loosing big money with the us dollar), i use the per sign up program , till i notice i got a sale and 2 days later the sale was pulled back, i thought what the fuck, i asked them , they said yeah he took the 3 day trial but he canseld the second day, i said so what?....hell dont show me money in my accound if they can pull it back, i dont like that, this happend 4 times in a row so i doubt should i push them or not.....

A simple concept Urb, that many sponsors, unfortunalty, can't seem to grasp! I prefer recurring myself. Finding the sponsor who knows how to keep the surfer engaged with original quality content - that's the hard bit - they are out there though.


I can't help seeing the irony in these situations though, a sponsor moves webmaster/s from PPSU to recurring, so webmaster/s can send potential customers to a program that can't keep the customer in the first place... I'ts almost funny!

:)

Damn, I know who you're talking now.

That sucks :(

But here's something to consider (since you said the traffic comes from LOR, and you don't seem to do this there, this doesn't apply to you - but lots of people hurt their rebills by using this method)

Anybody who puts too much emphasis on the free trial and say how there's no obligation because you don't have to stay a member, and say stuff like "Just cancel if you don't like it" or "Just try it for a few days and leave if you want" etc will have significantly less rebills than those people who focus more on just sending the surfer to the trial and don't mention the cancelling part.

Anytime you emphasize that the surfer can cancel, they're a greater chance they will remember to. And unfortunately most pay sites aren't THAT GOOD that they don't benefit from members who "forget" to cancel. People who rebill because they forgot to cancel account for alot of this industry's profits.

People who rebill because the forget to cancel account for MOST of the industry's profits.

It's all gonna change soon though |cool|