Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Markham
So what's the solution?
This is thread about the solutions and answers. We all know the problems and questions.
Kane I understand what you're saying. The only way forward today is to produce a product that is worth paying for, at a price the consumer is willing to pay and worth protecting. In that it's different enough to make it worth protecting. Producing the same old scenes that have been done 100,000 times before is pointless and then you have to attract the affiliates and spend money to get them.
By producing a product that appeals more to the surfers you sell more and don't need to spend so much on marketing. Nice if you can spend it on both but in the real world you can't. It's product first or marketing first.
It's the balance between the two. I will be launching a site that is pretty well unique and can't be duplicated. I will not need to spend a fortune to market it. If you have the traffic I need and don't send it you will lose, the traffic will find me. It's a generalisation, but I'm sure you get my idea?
Build a better mouse trap and you need to talk to a few people. Build the same one as everyone else and you need to tell a lot of people a lot of times.
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Fair enough. In response to the title of this thread we are not losing customers, they are just spread out more. It is the same thing with reports that profits industry wide are down. That might be true, but it is misleading. Some businesses might be making less money, but the industry as a whole isn't. The difference, as Some Guy said, is that there are a million sites out there. When I got into this business there were a lot of affiliate programs, but nothing like there are today and there were not nearly the number of webmasters. So the same amount of money (or more) is being spent on porn it is just spread out over more people now.
In the end if you can produce something different, you could attract an audience. People will buy if you give them something worth buying. Every day someone buys a luxury car that costs 50K when they could have gone and bought a decent car for 20K, but they like and want the better car so they are willing to spend. I have been spending my time doing two things: 1. working on finding the customers that have not yet found tube sites and things like that and 2. people looking for something specific that is harder to find. If you want hot naked teens there are millions of them for free all over the place. If you want something a little different it is harder to find and people wanting it will pay for it.
I have said before and will say again that I don't think this business is going anywhere soon. The tube sites are fads right now, but I still think most of those are a business model that is born to fail. They may not close down, but they will eventually be forced to change their format enough that they will lose some users and if they end up with a bunch of bookmarkers leeching off their bandwidth, fine with me. I want people that will spend money, let someone else get the freeloaders off on their dime.