Originally Posted by jayeff

Webmasters keep on with this illusion that if porn were not available for free, everyone who looks at porn now would become a paying customer. The cost of going along with this naive idea is that we stop looking for what is really holding us back.

But the vast majority of people will never pay for (online) porn and those who are willing to do so understand the difference between premium porn and free porn, even if, apparently, a lot of webmasters cannot make that distinction.

I grant that if there were zero free porn, we might see a trickle of one-time, curiosity sales. On the other hand, we would lose one of the best marketing tools we have, so on balance I seriously doubt we would come out in front.

If we actually want a bigger cake, instead of fighting over the one we have, we need to look at what we are selling and how we are selling it. For the most part we are selling crap which would be overpriced whatever its cost. A lot of sponsors put zero thought into marketing and most of those who do, direct their energy into ways to screw buyers out of more money than they intended to spend.

In the last few days I was emailed about a brand new site, one which turns out to be based on pics originally sent out by a content club in 2001/2002. It was dirt cheap when it was new and has been so overused I have been rejecting TGP submissions which still use it. This morning I get a list of hosted movie galleries from a very well-known sponsor: unlit, over-optimized rubbish that wouldn't sell an ID if it were the only porn site on the planet.

We aren't selling primarily to newbies any more because they are a tiny minority of the surfing population and the only countries still showing any serious growth in Internet takeup are ones that by and large we cannot process payments for. As long as so many sponsors rely on armies of affiliates to make sales on the mud sticks principle, rather than offering something people actually want to buy, making money will keep getting harder.

Yesterday Will76 posted here about a scam he had got caught up in relating to charges added to his telephone bill. Everyone who responded was rightly indignant and a few even compared it to the scams online porn runs. But all those comments were along the lines of how much worse that scam was than anything in adult, or see, we are not the only people pulling tricks like that. Not one person pointed out that if such scams upset us, perhaps they upset our customers too...