[Allfetish]

Originally Posted by jayeff

I haven't the vaguest idea whether overall we are losing or gaining visitors. I do know that online porn as a major industry is barely into its second decade and still moving towards the inevitable equilibrium between supply and demand. In other words, competition is getting fiercer and that surely impacts on the business done by the average site.

I do believe we have "stalled". The last real innovation from the mainstream adult webmaster community was live video back in what, 1997. Our product has generally improved and most of our sites are more user friendly, but essentially we have been selling the same things in the same ways for the past 5 years and more. The internet brings us a steady stream of new and therefore curious visitors, but the ratio of experienced surfers is steadily increasing and for those to whom we have failed to appeal, we have nothing new to offer.

While sites such as "I Shot Myself" and "Suicide Girls" have appeared out of left field as it were, longstanding webmasters have increasingly resorted to feeding off each other, rather than staying focused on building sales to the general public. Boards/sites like this may be benign, but they are still a symptom of that and others like Zango are most definitely not benign. With a handful of honorable exceptions, many of our major sponsors still treat surfers and affiliates as if we were in the 90's.

Bottom line, I suspect the report is at best a distortion, but I do believe that until a new generation of webmasters moves to the top of this industry we are being held back. Right now we must have many who long since fulfilled their ambitions and are marking time, others who owe their prominence to lucky timing and only momentum is keeping them moving. That doesn't make for a dynamic market, one that is better maximizing its potential.

Excellent post. I agree with the sentiment. It seems we have reached the point where conversion ratios seem to be ever climbing and competition is increasing making it harder to get traffic. Program owners now seem willing to screw over affiliates in their desperation to maintain a certain income level. They do this full well knowing the consequences that it will have to their relationship with potential affiliates. To me this tells me that either 1) Many of these people are starting to pursue an exit strategy where they are seeking short term revenue in order to be able to leverage that revenue in other non-adult ventures or 2) The program owners are taking calculated risks and assessing marketing conditions. They have decided that affiliate contributions to their revenues will likely decrease in the future.