- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
Hope I haven’t posted this here already, or in the past, but something that has been on my mind and I’m interested in feedback. I don’t promote any gay content or sites, so I don’t know how different it may be for some of you, or if the situation is similar across all genres.
During / after the recession 2009 / 2010 – ’13, there were a lot of changes in the industry, some of the companies that were hit hardest were the larger program with high overhead, and mainly the moms & pops, smaller sites who actually got swept aside by way of technology and the increase in quality from the late 2000’s.
I promoted Shemale / Transsexual primarily since I’ve been in the business, in 2013 there was a drastic decrease in sales and revenue, much of it was due to less sites / programs, and in my opinion, shaving, scrapping and non-credit for sales, as the traffic didn’t drip all that much. Subsequently I branched out to other niches, BBW, MILF’s / Mature early last year. Now they are popular niches, but still relatively small with respect to the amount of quality sites and number of options. I started from scratch and as of now I’m converting both niches well, but now that’s what got me thinking.
My view of the state of Affiliate marketing, content sales, it’s become a bit skewed. Performers and the average Joe now can be more self sufficient, marketing is for the taking for everybody and consumers have embraced being close to their favorite performers and bypassing marketing presented by people like us, albeit to either a greater or lesser degree.
The paysite model is becoming more antiquated, with models having clips stores and Amazon wish lists, as well as cam shows either personally on Skype or Chaturbate, it’s really diverted the path to turning a sale.
I’m finding it increasingly more difficult to find good programs, there are a handful of solid earning programs that are established programs that update frequently and have the current useful tools, however in trying to expand and find other suitable programs, it’s really hit and miss. Most programs these days put you through a screening process, which isn’t all that bad an idea as time is money for these folks, but I’ve found in many cases that when I get into the back end, the content and tools are crap. There are at least three or four programs in the last several months that I joined that I’m unable to promote, by virtue of either the content hasn’t been updated for a long time, or the content isn’t as good as what the tour showed.
It’s frustrating as obviously you’d like to spread your sales out by several good sites, but some of these sites just aren’t going to convert, not worth the bother. Then with a couple of these programs, they’ll hold your money forever. I have a program that owes me payouts from 2013, I realize it costs money and resources to run an affiliate program, but I also fear the days are drawing near to where it won’t be worth it for many sites to have an aff program. I’m already seeing several sites without any webmaster promotions offered.
I’m seeing more sites convert well, not fewer. Of course with some of those sites it’s exceedingly difficult to get good promo materials, but that’s nothing new – there’s always been sites with that problem.
Your comment about performers being more self-sufficient sounded viable when I first read it, but it’s been that way for a while now. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon wish lists, etc. all existed before the recession.
What I think has changed is that MindGeek has consolidated a lot of the traffic and Google isn’t as kind to smaller players. At the end of the day affiliates are traffic sources and that’s what’s getting more and more difficult. And it’s not just for affiliates – I believe it’s tricked down to sponsors. Marginal just won’t cut it anymore. They have to be on top of their game. But when they are, things are fine.
Oh, and to your other indirect point – things have changed with sponsors. They view affiliates very differently than they used to. The sheer number of affiliates is much smaller now. It’s more about personal relationships and/or whether you’re big enough to get on their radar.
paysites still make the best money for me, and for years and years TV and TS were my best niches, along with uncut cocks and hairy pussies. but over time, both the surfers and i realized that a lot of sites with hot tours had no actual content in the member area or had very little. more programs stopped updating. my best sponsor program was a network of very homemade TV sites in unusual niches, but over time their very irregular updates and small, meh quality videos made it harder to get rebills. lots of sponsors i’ve used went out of business due to new owners who didn’t have a clue, owners who didn’t change their tours and sites with the times, programs that didn’t offer what affiliates needed to promote their sites, program owners passing away.
i ran into another issue – some sites that used to sell great for us changed the way their sites and tours worked, so that the focus was on the network, not the niche. that was problematic for me, as i was marketing tight micro niches, so the focus on more sites and more content didn’t appeal to me surfers as much as each network site focusing on its own unique content and theme.
but all that being said, i still make more from paysites than dating, live cams or PPV.
things have changed. in the ’90s my partner and i made a lot of our money off pay per click and AVS sites. next came top lists. then in the first half of the 2000s, we made money off our own small paysites and TGP galleries – i apparently had a knack for galleries. things changed, and galleries needed more and bigger, higher quality pics. then came freesites in the mid-early 2000s, and we did well with those, too. marketing is always changing. review sites, blogs and tubes became bigger as TGPs and freesites became smaller. it’s all still out there, but one must keep adapting. changing niche can help, adding new niches but sticking to your original niche even better. and keeping up with marketing methods is important.
Jay’s point about google is so true. it’s not as easy to get big traffic from google, and they change how they do things periodically, which takes away traffic from many honest site owners, porn and non-porn alike.
and porn traffic sources have changed. for over a decade i posted my freesites at hunkhunter, and bought links there, too. now they’re gone, and it was pretty sudden. they’re not the only gay link site to disappear, either. and it’s not just link sites. some TGPS have become tube sites, others have become review or link sites, so those sites aren’t easy traffic sources any more for daily new sites or galleries. but we all keep adapting.,,
@Jay
This is a very good summary and insightful of the current state, I could not agree more.
Porn still sells very well, no doubt whatsoever about it.
The biggest worry for me is stagnation, that there is not enough new sites or producers. Majority of the 900 sites we have reviewed on GayDemon stopped updating, many of them very good. New fresh content is scarce.
Second to stagnation comes indifference and hostility towards consumers. Site owners who forget that their members are the reason they exists. I see this more and more, surfers main comment to me is “I won’t ever subscribe again”. Site owners needs to engage with their customers and address their concerns, help them and make them happy. Slapping badly thought out download limits and aggressive responses to support requests will kill off sites.
Luckely a few good sponsors are grabbing the opportunity and have started to create new sites, I think those are going to be the winners over the next few years. The ones who do not create something new will find it difficult to continue.
The last few years has also been a time of consolidation, both sponsors and affiliates disappearing. Thats not necessarily a bad thing. For example remember Gay Pay and their kind? Creating great looking tours but only ever something like 5 episodes for each site, then never update. Instead rely on massive cross sales and dodgy practices.
@Jay
I wasn’t seeing as prevalent a push with social media from a larger group of people until more recently, I’ve been active myself since around 2009 and have always used it for promotional purposes primarily. Obviously search engine traffic has waned from what we’re used to, but social media site have become more relevant to G and so has retweets and specific marketing methods. I too agree paysites are still the best method of converting, and rebills have been solid as well. Again, at least for me, it’s those handfuls of sites that are consistent, which I’m very thankful for, however my frustrations stem from certain sites that are good, but I can’t promote..
I’m not complaining so much about the industry as a whole, because quite frankly it’s gotten better and back to more consistency, I couldn’t be happier. Which is one reason it frustrating to not be able to promote sites with excessive traffic leaks, videos that are good in content, but not encoded properly, or sties that don’t have an affiliate program.
I agree with your sentiments about the lack of content, it’s something we have discussed on here numerous times in the past and it is frustrating when you’re sure you could do extremely well promoting a site but you just don’t have the content to do the job. This is something I have found when creating content for affiliates as a writer, sometimes I have to speak to a client and persuade them to abandon the site they were promoting and move to another in the niche, just because the content is no longer there.
With promotion of content and performers doing a lot of it themselves through social media (if I understood you correctly) there is an opportunity here. So many performers are just out there making a brand for themselves and they don’t much care if the link they’re sharing is from the company they work for or an affiliate. The solution is to get out there on Twitter, follow the biggest and best, and include them in the discussion when you post something.
Guys like Andy Lee, Paddy O’Brian, Mickey Taylor and Johnny V etc will almost always fave and retweet you if you post something on your blog or site and then tweet it out.
I think things are going to get better for sales, it seems that piracy is being attacked in the way we’ve wanted to see it attacked for several years. Maybe it’s just my perception, but it certainly feels as though the pirates are finally getting the nut kicks they deserve.
And again, this might only be my perspective, and maybe my searching and clicking habits have changed over the last couple of years, but it also seems as though the hobbyist porn sharers out there are giving up, or moving to Tumblr, and their impact on us as professionals has significantly diminished. People who run sites and blogs might not be seeing the promised increases in organic traffic Google likes to pretend we’ll all see if we obey them to the letter, but it doesn’t seem to be going to the shallow copy/pasters either these days.
It used to be that when you searched for a term, you’d get fifty blogs of shitty content from people who don’t know what an affiliate is. These days it seems that the blogging affiliate world is divided into two – those who stepped up their game and turned their affiliate blog into something more diverse, and those who never put the work in and are disappearing from the web because they’re no longer getting the traffic.
I guess I’m feeling quite positive about the way things are going. Shocker!
