As the Economy Improves....
 

Inquiring minds want to know, as the economy has continued to ever-so-slowly improve, have you noticed a subtle increase in sales and/or rebills? One would assume that sales should increase, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have. If they have, do you believe it's a result of the stabilization of the economy, or would you say it has more to do with changes you've made in the way you promote your sponsors? If sales haven't increased, what other factors do you think are holding things back for your business model?

Also, realizing that a lot of adult webmasters have transferred their efforts into mainstream, do you see yourself ever returning to, or spending more time on, adult? Or have your successes in mainstream made you decide to completely drop away from porn?

My paddling technique has improved a lot so far this year but sales on still shit.

I feel like I'm running at an exhausting pace trying to stay ahead, like paddling in this video.

Well, at least you're paddling. I'm sitting on the shore wishing I had bought a kayak. I spend far too much time thinking, and no where enough time doing.




(I honestly would like a kayak.)

Kayaks are great. Once you lay out the cash for the kayak and its accessories, unlike a boat, there isn't any ongoing expenses.

Other than paying to park the car and gas to get there kayaking is free which is great since we are struggling to get by.

Which brings back the topic of this thread... Sales were up a tiny bit last month for me but so far this month has totally sucked.

Now if it would only stop raining...

I think it has to do more with the illegal tubes than the state of the economy. Sure, credit cards have been tightened up but I think that is a secondary factor. Porn purchases are impulsive and a surfer, if the moment strikes him, will pay.

I used to have a top ten ranking for "thick MILFs" a couple of years ago but it has long since been taken by the tubes. Type a keyword combination into Google and what do you get? Ten first page links to illegal tubes. Once the surfer gets hook on to those why should they by a membership to a paysite? Perhaps if it is a micro-niche not covered by the tubes they'll pay, otherwise, it's free full length porn for everybody! In my most recent re-incarnation as a porn web master, I've tried to concentrate on CC bill, single girl (i.e. swinger) sites but that too is proving a challenge. Finding keywords combinations even for that niche is becoming more difficult every day.

All true and also very damaging to the state of affiliate marketing, throw in how google likes to change their rules, algorthyms, dangle your pr, etc. it's difficult to maintain consistent traffic. Programs as well are relying less on affiliates and pointing their efforts towards targeted promotions and discounted mailing list deals. The consistent money seems to be in very narrow niches, targeted keywords towards narrow niches to a specific client base. Bottom line is people are not consuming less porn, it's simply becoming slightly more difficult to convince them to purchase through affiliate marketing methods.

It's worse than ever - the "improvement" in the economy, which looks illusory to me, the replacing of good paying jobs with shitty paying jobs and calling that an "uptick in employment numbers", is having no real effect on anything.

It's extremely hard out there, online and offline wise. I have more time now to work online and I can see little more effect, but to little to say anything exciting. Mainstream is even harder.

To me an improvement in employment stats wouldn't have an effect anyhow. The surfer gets much of their entertainment for free now (i.e. Hulu and other legit venues). Going to SpankWire or SlutLoad to rub one out, they don't really give a thought (or care for that matter) as to whether the scenes they are watching are stolen. It's just where people get their porn. Hell, if it matters to them that much they can go to MyFreePornSite and watch full length porn videos that are not stolen (but in fact someone's back catalog) for free. A free model with an up sell blurs the distinction between what's stolen and what's not.

Sales still suck :(

Indeed... sales suck big big time!

I think overall sales stick suck for the regular webmaster, myself included.

Traffic has changed SO much over the past few years. Fewer sites (the big tubes) now take the biggest piece of the pie than we've ever seen in the past. Search engine traffic was devised over more sites. You could build a free site focusing on "milfs fucked hard" and you'd actually get SE listings for it. Now you don't, or you get very little.

Unfortunately I really don't see things changing much. I don't ever see link lists getting the huge SE traffic back. Only way that would ever happen is if google totally banned tubes, torrents and the like and that won't happen anytime soon considering torrents are the most illegal thing there is and they continue to link to them.

DMCA law has their hands tied. If they begin selectively excluding sites on their own for that kind of content they risk losing their safe-harbor status.

Web hosts that initially said they wouldn't host "illegal" tubes have changed that stance on advice of counsel for the same reason.

As long as DMCA stands as is nothing will change.

As for the OP's query. I had a 13% increase for 2011, but I couldn't say it's specifically as a result of any one reason. Way too many variables in play.

With so much competition from the big tube sites (showing up in most of the top results on major search engines for almost every keyword/phrase related to porn) it's all the more important that you focus on building the amount of high quality inbound links to your site.

This is especially true with the most recent Google Panda update. Top search engine rankings rely heavily on your "network" of good inbound links (and most of these tube sites have quite the network - as I'm sure you all know).

If you want to boost sales in 2012, get out there and build links to your site!

Another kicker to the puzzle is the use of MC/Visa "Gift" cards($25, $50, $100) that most adult CC processors block, and can't be rebilled!!! |catfight|

my sales are shit, and any new ones I do get, don't rebill

The people who seem to do the best, from what I can tell, are extremely organized, are at least a little diversified, and (I'm guessing) are bloggers and niche TGP'ers. I'm talking about individuals, not companies.

Also, and this is pure speculation, the people who make a living in adult don't necessarily rely on other people's traffic. Does that sound about right?

It will Nirvana and the streets will be paved with gold once we get rid of that pesky fusker.

Maybe? 80% of my traffic at LOR comes from search engines & links on other people's sites, so technically I heavily rely on other people's traffic.

I do adult (beside non-adult biz) a little over a year. Actually, I wanted to be on "1k/month level" at this time. In fact, I do barely 0,6k/month. The basic reason is, that I've done a lot of mistakes and at least 50% of my work was a complete waste of time. Especially I've ignored Google's preferences in blogging. I own about a hundred of domains (70% of them are blogs), and in addition I've done a lot of free hosted blogs (mainly under the pornblogspace service, they're now turned on "auto-rotation mode" and make no more than 3% of my total income - I mean the old ones...). In 2012, I will cancel approx. 50% of my current domains. Here are the points of what I will focus on 2012. |attention

1) Existing labor ratio will be maintained -> blogs, freesites and "easy TGPs" on reasonable domains. Some blogs and "easy TGPs" will be supported through freesites on its subdirectories.

2) In blogging I'll prefer more deep posts with embed vids, something similar as recently demonstrated "davidbendek" (micro-niched blogs).

3) Freesites are still a great tool for me. Since freesite biz becomes "the dinosourus of the industry", there is many space for promotion on the other hand. They constitute about 20% of my revenue, but in addition, in some cases they have quite good effect for a given domain!

4) In "easy TGPs" nothing special. I manually updating them once/month (while submitting freesite from sub-dir time to time), I'll keep 10-15 of the best ones.

5) I'll change things in the field of niches and sponsors. For example I have a very good traffic in "old men" and "old women" niches. But the ratios are absolutely terrible! Reason? Although they're weird enough, they're occuring in illegal tubes quite often... Pathetic advertising of some sponsors (such as bonus days, etc.) also pisses me quite well. After the last year experiences (if you hit the bonus few times, chargebacks will probably occur in a few weeks) I'll only do a revshare model. The most important criterion is $/click -> 0,01 is still ok for me, 0,02 and over is pretty good. So I'll focus only on those who sell a real product that rebills. So far I've found several programs, what meet these conditions (many of them are non-us), so I'll focus on these only.