[Suckerpunch]

I do a lot of consulting in the adult business and thought I'd share some insight that I have passed onto customer's recently... it's long winded (1,200+ words) so if you have attention deficit disorder, please ignore and move onto the next post...

Like most industries, the adult online business has followed a distinct pattern that essentially has three phases. The first is innovation, the second is “copycat” and proliferation and the third is a “shakeout” period. In the first phase an individual or company comes up with an idea or a product/service that is not readily available to the public. In the copycat/proliferation a number of companies will attempt to duplicate the innovators and put their own spin on it. Lastly during the shakeout period the market saturation causes companies to consolidate, downsize or plain leave the industry to lack of revenue.

The online adult industry started it’s innovation phase in the late 1990s, proliferated/saturated approximately 2000 to 2008 and is currently in the shakeout period as you see people selling off their sites, closing down model sites or just plain abandoning their holdings and moving onto their next endeavor.

I started in the business in 2000 (wow! Ten years!) when free sites reigned supreme. The business model was to build a site, load it with content such as free images and galleries, insert applicable banners and gain traffic through traffic trades and search engine optimization. The more sites and traffic, the more money you made. From 2000 – 2003 my average conversion ratio on free sites clicks was 1:275. You saw many webmasters building up vast networks of sites and cashing their affiliate checks with a huge smile on their face.

About 2003 – 2004 the market started saturating and conversion ratios started sliding. Each year you saw people jumping into niches that they’d never had any interest in before as a way of trying to regain lost revenue. This breeds itself into further saturation and the decimation of those conversion ratios.

So here we are in the shakeout period where people are wondering what the hell to do to survive in the business. Tube sites have proliferated and more people are jumping on this bandwagon further killing the average affiliate. Why? Because there is far too much content offered for free to the surfer. The average surfer is now conditioned to being able to view HOURS of porn videos at no cost to them. I think we can all be deemed guilty of doing this from time to time. YouPorn is currently #62 on the top 100 most popular sites on the Internet. I reviewed this tube site and didn’t see a single up sell attached to any of their videos. Their revenue model is largely selling memberships to dating and cam sites.

It’s safe to say that tube sites will not be the savior of your revenue whoas. Even if you do a legal tube with up sell potential to membership sites, the truth is I can Google “Porn Tube” and find 150 sites that will give me more of what I’m looking for at no cost to me.

Splash and landing pages gained a lot of popularity for a few years but those days are also ending. Google is starting the process of eliminating or burying these pages in relevant keyword searches and replacing them with sites with more dynamic content.

Free sites/tgps/mgps are still a viable option but there are a few changes that people are going to have to make in order to earn a buck at them. Content is king and if you’re not rotating and introducing new content regularly you’re screwed. You need to consistently work on building and maintaining your traffic and you need to look at different ways of monetizing your site such as 3rd party advertising options like JuicyAds. Lastly your design has to be pleasing to the eye, modern, uncrowded and with a colour scheme that doesn’t cause your user to go into epileptic convulsions.

Blogs continue to do well but again there are a set of conditions that you’ll need to dedicate yourself in order to make them profitable. Regular updates (at least 10 per month) are essential and if they are regularly scheduled (i.e.: Monday, Thursday, Saturday) your audience will become patterned to visit your site. Daily updates are great but if you do multiple daily updates Google seems to slap your wrist in search engine placement. Sitemaps are also essential and there’s an awesome plugin you can use to automatically update these and submit them to the relevant search engines. Lastly, and probably most importantly, you need to check your search stats on a regular basis and be able to shift the focus of your posts if the Google gods start sending you unexpected traffic.

For instance Google gave one of my nylon blogs an amazing placement for the search terms “English Schoolgirls”. I started getting between 120 – 160 visits a day from these keywords so I changed the blog update schedule from every 3 days to daily with every second post using content from Only Tease, Only Opaques, St. Mackenzies, etc. The end result was the site going from 10 – 12 sales a month to 20 – 25 sales a month. Had I ignored that keyword I would have left a considerable amount of money on the table

Design elements have changed dramatically and users expect a nice clean, crisp and modern design to the sites they visit. Overloading your pages with content and ads will piss the user off. Popups, chat boxes and live cam chat flash banners seem to discourage people from returning to your site. Visit some sites in your niche and see what bothers you about theirs and make sure you’re not going the same on your own site.

Search engine placement and efforts are more important then they ever were. If you have an option of spending money on banner advertising or SEO, take the SEO. Make sure you get written guarantees from your guru and withhold a portion of the fees until those are achieved. In the past I have asked my SEO freelances to give me a list of X number of placement promises and release payment when they have achieved them all. If they achieve 80%, I’ll release 80% of the payment. Don’t be afraid to negotiate with your contractors.

My last bit of advice for those of you with a free site network, start looking into microniches. Use the Google keyword suggestion tool and look for terms with 1,000 to 7,000 searches on a monthly basis. Microniche conversions are amazing once you get your sites up and running. I started a site called amateurbrapics.com when this selection of keywords only received 1,200 per month. The site has grown to be my most profitable site and with less then 500 uniques per day, I earn more with it than free sites with 10 – 15k in daily traffic. I am currently completing an ebook on the adult microniche market and will let people know when it’s available.

So to summarize….

- Free sites can still do well but look at improving your designs, maintaining traffic and content, and further monetizing your site.
- Tube sites will continue to erode affiliate site conversions so why contribute to the problem?
- Blogs are an excellent way to get search engine traffic and placement if they are regularly updated.
- Splash and landing pages are starting to be eradicated and should be ignored
- Microniche is a viable option if you can find applicable sponsors, domains and spend time working on them.

I am working on a post for those of you with pay sites as well. Hope my research has provided with some insight.

Cheers!
Chris