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In another thread people were talking about China being unprofitable, and someone mentioned Russia & Ukraine. So I’ve got a few questions…
What’s your personal list of countries that aren’t profitable for porn?
Is your list based on data or intuition?
Do you block those countries?
China is the number one, lots of traffic.
If I had to guess, I would also say India and South America. And yes, that would be based on assumption rather than fact. The facts I do know is that the US is the biggest, followed by the major European countries.
I dont block any countries, maybe I should.
Absolutely, China and Brazil generate big but unprofitable traffic. I can’t say anything about India because they are blocked in my firewall. To be honest, I like Russia, but they love shopping with stolen credit cards.
For us it’s based on intuition. We see massive spikes in traffic from China, Ukraine and Russia, with corresponding hack attempts, and no increase in sales. So, that leads us to believe that when it comes to porn most traffic from those three are only there for nefarious reasons.
I think most of our sales from from US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe.
We don’t currently block beyond hackers, but with one of our sites being hit hard last month we will now be looking at blocking those three. If anyone can suggest a service/method that’s affordable we would love to know about it!
One tip we got a few days ago is to use Wordfence “triggers” to kick out the aggressive bots. The settings might need a little tweaking to get it right, but when it comes to saving resources it’s a good method.
Those of you who block whole countries, can’t hackers just use a VPN to get around the block?
Bandwidth costs aren’t a big issue these days, but to avoid problems with that can’t you just strip the videos out of your tour and only show images if they’re coming from a low-profit country? That should discourage people who are just looking for free porn.
Regarding VPN, correct Matteo.g. Blocking China as a whole only keeps out the honest surfers and those who aren’t familiar with VPN connections. Doesn’t keep out the hackers and thieves.
Personally, I don’t discard the bandwidth. Every penny counts and those pennies add up.
Even though we run ProxyPass on our servers and the software does an excellent job of blocking burst attacks (hack attacks), the amount of resources and strain will bring a server to its knee’s during peak hours. Peak hours being determined by the bulk of your member traffic.
I’ve seen members running Download Manager’s that are beating the hell out of a server and server response times go to shit. Of course, I’m always on the the servers so I see this immediately and on the phone with the host.
While it’s hard to rule out which countries to block, even in respect to Russia, and some South American countries, again, it’s only to keep out the honest naive surfers. VPNs make it next to impossible to keep out the hackers/thieves and/or traffic that will just use up your server resources.
Your idea of serving up just a screencap image for the video rather than actual video might be a good idea. I’m not a tech to that extent, but when you have as many sites as we run, I imagine it to be time consuming. But worth mentioning to the team and see what the response is like. We started limiting views to 6 on most of our tours, so I don’t expect to see something like this implemented very fast. Who knows?
My only issue with this is I can see people already using a VPN before they get to your sites block, resulting in you giving the full videos anyway.
Its worth noting in countries alike china, ukraine, russia, india, and some of south america, that a lot of people are more used to using VPN’s anyway and that their inhabitants and generally more tech savvy than some of us in the west like to believe, I read recently that 65% of all apps in the app store are produced in india, even the ones that are for companies in the west.
Obviously you will never block them all, but when a DDoS attack happens, the IP of the incoming attack does tend to be Russia/China and not from random locations around the globe, I am supposing that putting a DDoS attack behind a VPN must be harder than a single computer.
My experience personally regarding china involves 3 Million hits over 5 years to my old blog and a further 2 million hits at companies / networks I have worked for and seeing 0 sales from my blog and limited if any sales at the companies I have worked at.
Russia sends sales, but they just chargeback, which as a paysite means a refund + $30 chargeback fee per credit card transaction. I always wonder if we “split fees” with affiliates and included the chargeback fee if we would ever see anyone send any “shit country” traffic.
But generally I personally block countries on my personal sites, and as a result see little if any hack attempts, French Twinks runs slightly differently in that we use software to assess risk which takes into effect different variables, to determine blocking… but please don’t ask me what as I don’t manage that end.
