I'd like to know which affiliates of PAYSITES are growing and thriving. I don't know any of the big affiliates that are friends of mine who are making more money now selling paysites than they were before piracy. Not one.

I'm sure that there are some guys who are newer (5 to 8 years in the business) who may be making what they consider to be "great" money on cams and dating...So maybe they are making more simply because they never made more back before the economy collapsed? I'm sure everyone has different circumstances. But for the most part sales are down across the board for everyone, and for affiliate sales to paysites it is downright dreadful.

well, you're right to some extent. However, it doesn't mean those taking the bad part shouldn't be worried. I mean, if you have a program and start to lose and lose I bet you won't care at all if someone else is winning, you'll pay attention to your pocket.

In today's economy, losing a 0.01% of the whole market could mean losing 10, 20 or 50% of your income.

See, there's a fluctuating mass of money which will represent a certain market. In example, people will spend their money in housing, food, clothes, whatever..... and entertainment. Thus, adult market has a given share of entertainment and entertainment has a given share in global economy. More or less, it stands the same (despite what most people would think, people doesn't like to cut much on entertainment, however, bigger or smaller, there's a cut), but if the whole mass of money is reduced, it lowers the amount of money of any market niche. This way, it could perfectly happen that your sales increase and you have better conversions, yet you're winning less in absolut terms.

An easy example: let's say I had 10000 uniques and made 10 sales. My market share was 10% on a market of $100,000. I'd be having 1:1000 conversions and getting $10,000

Now, let's say the total market is reduced to $80,000. If my share keeps equal, I'll get only $8000 (20% less), so even if my conversions grow 10%, I'll be losing money as long as my conversions don't hit at least a 20% growth.

Obviously that's a very simple example that isn't taking in mind recurring sales for the sake of easy explanation.

So yes, you'd be growing in relative terms and still losing in absolute terms. Problem is that market is reduced not only in absolute terms (as in total available money) but also in relative terms (as in shares of market). The thing is that if you were barely making it with a better economy, you'll be losing for sure with this economy.

So, 2 possible solutions are: a) having something new and get a market share on novelty or b) maximize what you already have and keep the money in your pocket.

There are other solutions, but IMHO these are the more easy to achieve with the lesser risks (in option a) it will depend on the "new thing", of course, but adult industry is usually an industry where you can launch new stuff at low cost)

Robbie got it very right. This is exactly what I was talking about.

I remember those days and made heaps myself from just a couple of good programs, I can't see money in porn like that ever again, for affiliates anyway:(

I think you can say that about any industry though. I mean I remember mainstream where you could literally buy extremely powerful links for pennies (no one knew the value of links) and get yourself ranked in the top 10 for anything.

Mortgage companies were paying fortunes for leads and people were naive enough to enter in their phone numbers and e-mail addresses in forms. The government didn't give a crap about online casinos and pharmacies.

The web has just matured. Surfers are smarter and more people are looking to cash in.

the thread starter has a program in his sig that I assume is his that literally has almost no traffic - never seen Alexa rankings so bad for domains that have actual websites on them, I have domains with nothing on them that have more traffic.

Our stuff is doing below 1:90 for the whole 2009 so far.

I don't receive nowhere much affiliate traffic, in fact it's only 14 days since first FHG's and tube clips were added as everything was in re-development for quite a bit.

Affiliate traffic is in average below 1:500 as it's less quality.

Top 3 affiliates are sending 90 pct. of affiliate joins.

Legal tube site with licensed full length content channel is converting below 1:500 too.

Our stuff is different and has a general appeal.

Now it's needed to market it extensively, I'm fighting for a decent advertising budget to see what is the potential of the market yet.

The conversions and $ / 1000 uniques are great but there's not that many sources of good traffic anymore and everyone is stressed out working, not easy to close them.

gettin bad out there...

Brutally honest, yet a fantastic post Robbie. :thumbsup

the surfer forums with direct download links to every exclusive content paysite's movies and photosets hosted on file sharing hosts like Rapidshare, Megaupload and the 100 other clones are much worse a problem than tubes and torrents.

and if any of us were serious about it, there's only one answer to it, you track down the actual owners of these forums and you break their legs.

I agree that there'll be a big reassessment this year with quite a few going out of business (seeing a lot of small ones closing allready in our niches) ...

Wrong, maybe 10% of the affiliates are a pain in the ass - maybe 20% - but the majority isn't ... actually there are 3 groups of affiliates:
- The ones you don't even notice without looking into the stats - just sending sales and happy with their payouts
- The ones that need high maintenance (custom stuff, etc.) but bringing enough sales to keep it worth it
- The last ones .... the ones that demand high maintenance and sent you 5 uniques afterwards
Your statement only fits the last group - the first 2 definately aren't as they bring sales ...

Partly true ... you've to generate enough traffic/sales to keep your program ALIVE without 1 affiliate - affiliate should be on top of that - it's a basic business rule not to rely on other people generating your basic income ...

Totally wrong - why would that be true? Large networks/programs have a lot of overhead costs to be covered and most of them didn't learn to save their money for "bad times" - it's much more easier for a small company to adapt to changes ...

Most people (affiliates as well as programs) that go out of business just missed the point of adaption and now die ... it's not like we didn't know changes were coming a year or two ago ...

well as far as going out of business, i think many can manage. But i think that pay sites have to start to change. They have to get much more inter active and they have to drop their price. Prices look good till your trial ends then you pay up 50 bucks for month access. That's just a price that does not fit in these financial times.

The sooner the price drops the faster the surfer will be interested in buying members ships again. When you look at tube site you that many of them have a lot of movies that are 2 to 8 min long. This is fun for a while but looking for good movies will want to get a serious site where they don't have to search all the time or get disappointed that money is not loading or has a crapy quality. Those movies that are full length are all the same and getting boring very soon. Every one has seen them all over the place. And those that like those movies are even better off with a membership to a large dvd site where they can also download them and stream them in high quality.

What i try to say is that even now that people try to get everything for free at tube site, real buyers will want to have a good service and are willing to pay for it. Password sharing site and download sites is a whole different problems which has been around for years, and i don't think its going to change any time soon. The upside is that those that don't want to wait for a 4 gb movie on utorrent will buy a membership if the price is right.

there's no waiting on Rapidshare

Excellent post Robbie and hit the nail bang on the head.

even on rapid share its not going that fast that it will be on your hd right away. then use have to go the usenet server way that can go with 1 mb per seconed and then you need a fast connection and also pay at least 7.50 euro per month. So its not free.

i wasn't saying anything about affiliates.

why do affiliates matter?

when were affiliates or the affiliate model promised a permanent place in this business?

ALL major programs have made a shift over the last several years to make affiliates a smaller part of their business model.

porn is not the peoples socialist republic of china.

if you can't make it as an affiliate... then stop making buggy whips and do something else since you've already declared yourself obsolete.

reducing the argument to "piracy is killing affiliates" is even more absurd. affiliates will never be the ones to stop piracy. content owners clearly have little interest in stopping piracy. so if its over, have the courage to admit its over and find something else to do :)

and again... anyone who has been in this biz for years, knows this simple fact is true... this exact statement "we're gonna see some popular programs out of the biz in the second part of this year" could be true, any year for the last 10 years and means nothing.

suggesting that you're hurting, therefore no one is succeeding.... is a pretty backwards view and one that condemns you to failure.

:2 cents:

You're right about that. But I'm not sure anybody is suggesting that at all. For instance, I specifically said that every paysite owner I spoke with to a man at Internext, Phoenix Forum, LA Webmaster Access, and XBiz Summer Forum....ALL reported big losses in revenue from piracy.

I mistakenly thought you were insinuating that webmasters were out there doing well. Which is why I asked you to name one.

My bad. In that case, I'd like to know one paysite that has been around at least 3 years that is on track to make more money this year than last.

Not saying that they aren't making good money (we are), but doing well means growing revenue. Not going sideways or backwards. I don't count brand new sites because they could be doubling their income...from a small amount to twice a small amount heh-heh

I'd just like to know which sites or business models in adult are making the most money they ever have right now. Not last year, not 6 months ago. But right now.

lets look at that from a logical perspective.

to make the claim that you have "huge losses from piracy" means being aware of every possible source of loss, or cause and then being able to apportion some blame to each potential cause... and being able to objectively analyze yourself and your business and determine how to apportion blame to each.

it means also understanding what was previously being lost to piracy since 1996, (usegroups, stolen members areas, p2p networks etc), and what the total net positive change is currently.

the fact of the matter is i can think of many many many reasons who so many are losing money. piracy has always existed and free porn has always existed. these things have ALWAYS been the blame for failure. its not a new "cause". there are many factors.

i have yet to see any real webmaster stand up and say "i failed" as they quietly go from boom to bust. there is always a "cause" and its always "something else"

interestingly, no on wants to talk about how sites like youporn.com, keezmovies.com, pornhub.com, tube8.com etc have totally out SEO'ed them and are generally taking an increasingly larger % of total adult traffic (and general adult PR) by working SMARTER. their traffic gains as an example, have nothing to do with "piracy" or "stolen videos" but that just sounds good.... and while everyone is playing "who's causing my failure besides me"... others are quietly growing and taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of search engines and traffic and are now the ones ranking for porn movies, free porn, porn etc etc etc etc etc.

these arguments also assume that everyone in this business is a solid, competent business person. that the playing field is even, that everyone is quietly making pencils with their pencil factories and are at the mercy of the total market demand for pencils. the honest truth is that this business is full of absolute retards who abuse surfers, their credit cards and their trust and full of people who's very success is from abusing others, lying, cheating, stealing and so on.

no one can cause ones failure but himself. like life, business is a very dynamic and fluid environment full of changes and challenges. many will rise to meet them. many will be on the cutting edge, many will blaze entirely new trails and MOST will simply wither away and die as change occurs.... as has ALWAYS been the case.

my personal pet peeve with people in this industry is that people always blame something else as a "cause". anyone that blames something else has quietly admitted that they have failed themselves.

Those are good points...BUT you are waaaay underestimating what people who are in this business know about their own stuff. I and most others know exactly how and why our traffic and money fluctuate. It's our business to know. And trust me...the piracy of today is nothing like usergroups.

As far as the tube sites you mentioned "out seo'ing" everybody...Bullshit. When you have millions of people uploading stolen content and then posting it on huge surfer forums every minute of every day...There is no genius SEO guru involved. That's just plain out numbers of people doing it. I had the same phenomenom from 1998 to 3 years ago with my tgp's. When I was Ampland I had over 30,000 uniques plus a day just from Google. When you added in Yahoo, MSN, and the other search engines we had massive search engine traffic.

And I didn't do squat for it. It was just a matter of sheer numbers.

And yeah, I can definitely understand your peeve with people blaming anything but themselves...but in this case the numbers simply don't lie. And neither does common sense. The rise of mass pirating of content and sales dropping correlate almost exactly. And common sense tells you that if you can get something for free you are less likely to pay for it.

But as I said earlier, I don't see a lot of guys hurt so bad that they are "failing", unless you're like me. For me I AM failing because I'm not growing. Yeah, I'm "losing" at a lot smaller rate than a lot of others...but that's not how I do things. If I'm running sideways or not increasing revenue then I consider it a fail. Doesn't mean that a lot of guys are going out of business. But it does mean trimming stuff down. Cutting staff, etc.

And by the way, the tube sites you mentioned don't even have to "work smarter". The entire model is the genius part. Once they had that in place the script and the surfers do all the work while they kicked back and made money off of prepaid dating and cam spots and now by selling traffic to traffic brokers.

That IS smart. But too late for me and the thousands of others trying to copy the tube model. Just like with TGP's. When we were among the first with the most and then EVERYBODY tried to buy a script and make a "fake" tgp that circle jerked. It just didn't work. People tend to pick and choose in the beginning and then it's a done deal.

Same with tubes. I don't foresee how anybody could start a tube today and ever knock those big guys off their thrones.

Anyway, I'd still like to know who at least one of those guys who is "quietly growing and taking advantage of everone's ignorance of search engines and traffic" are.

What ignorance? People are searching for free full length movies. End of story. :( Doesn't take any special knowledge of SEO to figure that out.

open tube8.com and point out the stolen movies.

i have no interest in going through all this point for point indefinitely. i respect your views and opinions. i happen to disagree.

if you don't understand how they are ranking number 1-2-3 for all the hottest porn terms, and think that's just because random kids are posting useless, low value backlinks in forums while they upload stolen videos, then you're mistaken. that's not how they target specific words and phrases and that's not how you rank number 1 for the webs strongest adult terms.

Okay. I have to respectfully completely and totally disagree with you on that. It's a numbers game and that's been my real world experience. And I definitely don't think it's "kids" uploading. RemoveYourContent.Com could open your eyes in a quick hurry how massive the pirating is and who does it and how it spreads like wildfire across forums that are bigger than you would have ever thought just 2 years ago.

I guess when it comes to the big tube sites and the torrents I have a dual perspective from being in the traffic and tgp game for a long time AND being a content producer and paysite owner. I know how traffic works and how the numbers game will force the search engines to acknowledge you without much effort on your part because I did it. Hell, I didn't even notice it we were so big at one point.

These days more and more people use google for everything they go to. And when you type in "free porn" in google you are going to get those tube sites because they are the biggest in the world.

And I'd bet that search engine traffic they get is infinitesimal to their overall numbers. I'd also bet that it's nowhere near as valuable as you might think. Simply because it's people searching for free shit. Yeah, some of it will convert. Just saying not as much as other more valuable keywords and phrases will.

I'd much rather have the top spot for "milf" or "big tits" or "hardcore sex" or a hundred other keywords I can think of. Hell, look for "hardcore sex" and you'll see Worldsex there near the top.

Do you think Pierre is spending a lot of time working on SEO? I doubt it. It's numbers in that case.

I don't know if stolen, but dubious to say the least since nobody is selling that content and they don't have any link to sponsors that could provide it

http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/retro-savannah/79040/
http://www.tube8.com/fetish/jenna-jameson-sybian/70618/
http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/underwater/31986/
http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/celeste-in-shiver/22426/

I admit I did a search for obvious terms that would probably send stolen content results. I gotta admit tube8 is one of the cleanest tube sites as well. But at least when it started, I'd say they had at least 70% of stolen content, there were some huge heat with that site. And that's how they became big. And at the same time, they still provide full movies to the freeloaders (an arguable point for sure), which is Robbie's point as well.
See, Worldsex is big and legit. However, they became big after his previous owner (Mads) img src'd most of their trades in the times nobody knew that trick, so eveybody sent him legit hits in exchange of nothing. Now they're legit and with different owners, but it doesn't mean the site became big by his previous owner using crook techniques. There are a couple big playas here that started cheating, stealing and such and became legal afterwards. Hey, even motherfucking Hun delivered passes to members areas when it started! My point is that some sites can be really cool now, but it doesn't mean those sites didn't grow from stealing and that they didn't hurt someone in the meanwhile

"porn" shows over 5,000,000 searches a day in Google.
"sex" shows even more than 5,000,000 searches a day

do a search.. and whatddayaknow... there's pornhub.com and keezmovies.com in the top spots.

i fail to understand who one might rationalize that as being "small"

then you factor in all the other related targeted phrases they actively attack i.e. "porn movies" etc. and ancillary phrases they rank for incidentally, you have a very significant piece of total US search traffic being owned by a relatively few sites.

you however, seem to have a business model from 1997 and you are frustrated in 2009 at trying to grow it and blaming "piracy". that right there is something to think about. your business model (grampland.com) is perhaps the absolute worst for search engines in recent years... and this is why they are all sinking in search results in the last 2-3 years.

the nature of page rank itself is that its a zero sum system. someone has to lose for someone to win (discounting the creation of new pages - which also requires factoring in those that disappear). ultimately its a value that's distributed across all domains and their pages based on what links to what. if you don't eventually start winning, you will eventually start losing. that's just a simple exercise in mathematical probability. the numbers are recalculated and redistributed every few months and either you are building and linking well or you are not and will lose to those who are. the probability future success are against you if you don't. pirates won't cause your traffic to disappear and pirates wont cause you to drop out of the SERP's completely on one of the upcoming updates any more than pirates are causing pornhub.com and keezmovies.com to rank number 1 and number 2 for sex.

and while like the multitudes who start threads about getting fucked after an update others will still be working quietly and furiously to make sure that trend continues... and i promise you, Pierre will not be ranking for much of anything in the coming years.

funny you mentioned worldsex.com - same one from 10 years ago? search engines are no longer impressed with it and neither are users that can go straight to videos.

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=40...=worldsex.com&

I have neither a 1997 business model nor am I frustrated. I'm just answering the questions here honestly and from experience. And the alexa charts show nothing more than the fact that a tgp can not compete with full length free vids. Again...the NUMBERS game. They have all the traffic because people flock to free full length porn vids. Then the search engines pick up on it, and the cycle becomes self fulfilling. The same way it once was with our tgps. Remember, "Success breeds success"

And no, I'm not "frustrated". I'm still making a fantastic living doing what I love. I'm just pointing out the facts. And yes, in 1997 I made a shitload of money. And yes, this year I'm going to make a shitload of money. :) Not frustrated at all. I WAS frustrated a year ago when everytime I put up an update it was all over the internet for free within a few hours. But not now.

And as far as my Grampland.Com being "the absolute worst for search engines in recent years." You have literally and absolutely no idea of what you are talking about when it pertains to that site. My traffic on that site is pure gold, and I'd just about bet that I make more money per unique visit than any other free site you've ever been to. But that's where experience and knowledge come in. :)

By the way, just to clear up your misconceptions about Grampland and the search engines...this is from Google Analytics for Grampland.com:
# Referring Sites 99,978.00 (58.68%)
# Direct Traffic 36,495.00 (21.42%)
# Search Engines 33,895.00 (19.90%)

The absolute worst? Okay, if you say so. :winkwink:

By the way Pleasurepays, I know we're sparring a little here. But if you look at the combined info from our posts it makes for some pretty interesting reading.

Wow a biz related post!

Great discussions in this thread.

interesting read.
StariaDaniel:"affiliates are a pain in the ass for most program owners," I ment they cost money ( 40-70% ) and are demanding a lot of work for paysite owners, does that help/make sense?
and they are "helping" to spread free porn.

the whales thing I have to excuse myself about, not much whales left indeed, in this game.

all just pixels on a monitor :)

I enjoyed your convo atleast :)

:1orglaugh

all just pixels on a monitor :)

trying to relearn advanced algebra and some calculus while i work... so i don't have much time really dig into this and put together well laid out arguments. i honestly think that people in these discussions are missing the fact that these guys who are currently ranking number one, two, three etc are ranking for porns most competitive phrases because of their SEO efforts. i watch all the sites very closely. i know who is who, who links to what and what everyone is doing. whether or not viral traffic and the subsequent low quality, short lived links play a role or not.. its a minor one and they aren't the reason they rank number one for "sex", or "porn" or "free movies" ;)

you can trust me on viral traffic. having created many sites like felonspy dot com which has been all over national news, or medical adoptions dot com (which prompted calls from the FBI among other agencies) or revengecrabs.com where we launched a massive radio talk show campaign to promote it as real... and many many many more. i am well aware of what viral traffic is, how it works, where it typically comes from, the value of those links and how FAST they drop away.

pornhub.com claims to get 10,000,000 uniques a day. assuming that's true, and there's no reason not to believe it.. most likely at least 2-3 million of that is search hits. ... and that's just one site of several working together to take over THE most searched porn related phrases. there is a dozen sites that literally get over of 10,000,000 search engine hits a day combined. that didn't happen and isn't happening because of piracy :)

in fact, everyone keeps making this argument about piracy as THE unfair advantage they have... but i've yet to see someone actually prove a site like tube8.com or keezmovies.com isn't licensing full length videos and cutting them into scenes. whatever piracy does exist, if it does on those sites, is most likely very negligible.

everyone keeps arguing that "prepaid" cam ads are the single greatest reason they are in business and the top tube sites don't have cam ads. they have their own white labels. if its profitable (which it obviously is) that's not going to go away.. so its a moot point anyway.

and in these conversations:

everyone refuses to accept that tube sites convert traffic

everyone refuses to accept that tube sites with full length videos convert traffic

everyone refuses to accept that surfers just aren't interested in blogs, link lists, tgp's and mgp's

everyone refuses to accept the 100 other reasons their conversions are plummeting and willfully ignore those who say "hey, i've been sending XXXX hits a day to bangbus for 5 years and conversions have never changed for me"

everyone refused to accept how much of their traffic was being robbed by malware like zango and others

everyone refuses to consider how many people in the last 2 years just got fucked by everyone's "Free Pass" crap where they say $0.00 and then hit the card 4-5 times for $39.95 - all recurring - some of which is STILL going on in spite of looming prosecutions and civil suits.

everyone refuses to accept the sheer volume of surfers who have been fucked over, being sold a site that has shit for a members area

this list of reasons can go on and on and on and on as to what affects conversions and their cumulative effects today. there certainly isn't one single factor.

from my perspective, these conversations are not about an objective, reasonable, logical look at whats going on.. weighing all the facts and evidence, having a rigorous debate and then reaching a conclusion... these conversations are about people venting frustration and assigning blame and who don't want to hear anything other than what was already predetermined to be the "cause".

as link directories continue to plummet in the search results because of GOOGLE, people like Marc or Jay or others are lurching forward and backward, side to side trying to figure out what to do... and ignoring the fact that the most important plan that needs to be followed is public information, published at Stanford and remains just as relevant today as ever. Marc is adding dirty jokes to hoes.com. he could spend his time doing that, or he could spend his time building a large network of sites to slow the bleed of traffic and eventually start regaining it. he built a beautiful Ferrari... tuned it up, made it fast... then drove it right down a muddy hillside and is heading towards the bushes.

my single point in all this is that the "its piracy" argument is weak... if a factor at all, its one tiny factor of many many many. blaming a tube site for ranking number 1 for "porn movies" because of "piracy" leaves you with zero options unless you are going to change federal law. that's not a reasonable goal. no more reasonable than trying to change the rules of war while you are under attack. you regroup... you assess the situation, you identify all the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. you devise a strategy to user their weaknesses against them... and you continue until there is parity and you can take them head on.

or... you can just let them, surfers and Google sort it out for you.

personally, i choose to be proactive and the "hows" and "why's" and "who's" are mostly irrelevant and at best, just details to overcome... not insurmountable obstacles, at the foot of which, you lie down and give up.

:)

This is a good post with valid points. However, some of them are absolute and don't contemplate problems as a whole. Put in other words, you're doing the same you're complaining other people do: just take a single issue and make a generalization from it. Saying tubes didn't affect the business to everybody else is ridiculous and you're giving yourself the answer: if the pie is 100 and before tubes your slice was 30 and then comes someone which takes 90% of the whole pie, simple logic indicates that you'll be losing. I explained that more in detail before.

Comparing tube conversions (for what I know from many sources, EXTREMELY POOR) with other traffic sources like Robbie's or SE is downright non-sensical. Obviously, if you have 10,000,000 unique visitors a day there's a chance you'll be making money (enought to cover costs and get a decent gain after that? I don't know, don't have any info on the subject). However, if you convert 1:10,000 (and I've seen tube traffic conversions of 1:30,000, so I guess that's not a far number) and assuming for the sake of visualization an AMAZING CTR of 10%, you'll have 100 sales.

Now, a niche site that has 100,000 visits, with the same CTR (and believe me niche sites have way better CTR than any tube, general tgp or whatever) and converting 1:500 will have 20 sales. Yes, not as much as a tube site, but with 1/100 of the costs, and more important, enough to give the owner a really nice income. What I try to say here is any webmaster on this situation wouldn't care at all about tubes or not tubes or the business going to the trash.

So I don't refuse tubes converts traffic (since you went in absolute terms and say EVERYBODY IS REFUSING TO....). I'm just saying that they convert. Like crap.

I don't know your background and assume you're somehow related to a tube site. So this is what I can say for tubes. Now, for some of your points, I see they'r really valid or at least they deserve some deep discussion. Esp the following:

That's exactly how I think (you even called me a scammer because of that, lol), and as I said in this thread, people is petrified in horror and can't think clearly. There are many many MANY solutions you can use against or in conjunction with tube sites, yet nobody is using them. Either way, crying about tubes won't make them disappear, so people better adapt to the new rules of the game.

Hope at least this thread makes people think

There is quite a fair amount of intelligent commentary in this thread and it's nice to see. I just wanted to add a couple of my own observations as someone who has been in and around the business since 1996.

1) The doom and gloom scenario has been professed every time a significant change came over the industry: Top Lists, TGPs/MGPs, When AMEX shied away and now tube sites. While I agree that numbers are at an all time low, the demise of the industry is not something I see as possible. What I do see is what was professed above that many will go away, leaving chunks of market share for those who can survive. As for all the tube sites, they have to survive too so the cycle they've helped create whereby getting commission from a sale is less and less likely, will cut into their own revenues and kill some of them off as well. They may also see it become increasingly more difficult to have content to steal if the amount being produced goes down because of the state of things. Of course, all that will cycle people back into the game as problems correct themselves and then reappear. It's like a pulsating lung.

2) Someone up there mentioned how all surfers now are smarter and know where to get free content. While I do agree that the average surfer is much more informed and connected to content than ever before, I can't agree entirely because if this was true we would not see a difference in conversion from tube site traffic vs. other forms of traffic. If the guy coming from some link list site also visited XYZ tube site than he should be 1:30,000 likely to buy as well as the traffic from XYZ tube site. This doesn't happen.

3) Another topic often mentioned in this thread is the need to innovate. I'm not sure I agree in so much as it's about coming up with some crazy porn theme concept anyway. All the "reality" ideas long ago jumped the shark and I think a porn gimmick is about as viable for increasing sales as is any lame TV show for getting ratings. The vast majority of people buy porn quite simply to masturbate. They get plenty of free content to do that to these days but they will still pay to get it delivered to them in better ways or to get it more conveniently without the need to search all over the place to cater to their tastes. I've seen just about everything, I know where every freaking site out there more than I care to and I will still spend a few bucks here and there at HotMovies.com just because they flat out organize it better and I get what I want right when I want it.

So other than just those additional thoughts above I think that the people who will thrive are the ones who realize the real motivations behind money being spent on porn and go out of their way to cater to those. A VAST majority of the businesses online try to guess at what people want or just throw a ton of shit against the cyberwall to see what sticks. The sites that are built on the real psychology of their target market always do well (which is why it's usually best to build a site based on your own content tastes). To figure out what that psychology is, I suggest you simply take a look at your own habits with regard to being a consumer in this industry.

exactly, the big tubes in google on terms like "porn" or "sex" did maybe 10 minutes of optimalization and thats all. they are not some kind of smart SE gurus and their position is exactly because of their popularity (=natural backlinks and so on...)
I ranked for "porn" or "free porn" in the top ten results with my small TGP in the past too and it took me really a lot of work to beat big guys. If I were in their position (like Robbie´s tgps), it would be really easy to get there fast.
btw. great posts from you Robbie.

I recommend everyone to read this thread in full.

what you did or did not do and whatever short lived success you had "in the past" has zero to do with today. Google does update its algorithms you know. PageRank does shift between sites every time its recalculated. Pages win and lose every time they do the shuffle and everyone's pages and links that affect everyone else's pages and links gain and lose values which are redistributed across all adult sites (and technically, all web pages online).

you seem to have some misconceptions about search engines. "optimization" means little and the rules change when you have several hundred thousand pages to work with. you can't just take a PR 3 domain and change the page title to "porn" add some blurbs of text and sit back and wait.

and... i'm sitting here looking at their link networks, their paid links etc. i've been doing it for months. i know quite well what they are doing and to what extent. their domination of the SERP's is not an accident at all.... of course, no one is interested. no one really pays attention when they come here announcing they are buying links. no one has the slightest interest in investigating or calculating the potential benefit of those new hardlinks. its all summarily dismissed so 'piracy' can be blamed and not some degree of incompetence.

in the meantime, they are grabbing a bigger and bigger piece of the pie by effectively targeting the most searched adult phrases there are, by executing a painfully simple strategy, day in and day out and making headway on all fronts.

you could say its viral linking that made them rank well. why is redtube.com is rarely found in search results? they were among the first to explode! they still have huge traffic. your explanation dictates that they would be ranking for porn and sex and porn movies and would be at the top... success creates success and so on ... but they're not. why?

its like saying "steroids made him big" and forgetting dismissing or ignoring the intense workouts, the strict diet and carefully planned regimen... all adhered to with a consistent and fanatical discipline.

it just doesn't work like that. at best, steroids only amplify the effects of doing things right. they don't magically transform you without hard work.

no one is explaining why redtube.com is virtually nowhere in the SERP's for sex, porn, porn movies and similar phrase, although they have similar traffic and a longer history and were always claimed to be the first, original thieves and pornhub.com, tube8.com and keezmovies.com dominate.

"they steal, so i lose and its not my fault" seems to be easier to accept.

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=40...eezmovies.com&

You are making too much sense, Stop it please

Makes pretty decent sense to me. I have been asked many times from both pornhub and keezmovies guy's to sell them hardlinks but never by redtube or megarotic etc. Although the massive short time viral linking etc does help too.

No shit! This info is great! Best thread I've seen in a long time.