Are We Working for A Dying Industry?

Do not forget the extra amount to bribe some dude in the parking lot to buy it for them.

Nahhh, it just keeps getting better and better especially if you're in the cartoon end of the biz.

If the US government stopped screwing with us, this would definitely be a non-dying industry. But at this pace, I'm quite scared. Let's see what happens when Bush is gone

Compared to the 80's the Government has yet begun to screw with us at all.

Platinum Dave pretty much nailed it with his response. The smaller fish will be gobbled up and the strong will survive.

The days of making a quick buck are over, welcome to the real world.

DH

hehe good one

Awesome thread this, please keep voicing your opinion everyone

This is a great point & like the gold rush, lots of folks made more money selling the pick axes, setting up whorehouses & so on to the prospectors.

Whoops! Guess I should've kept reading before I replied.

AfterShock & Peaches make great points too. I keep getting emails from programs that push crap like herbal penis pills & they wonder why I won't throw up a banner. My bookmarkers & members know me & *trust* me. If I started promoting garbage, the payouts could never be high enough to salvage my business.

Also these days there a lot of high quality sites to choose from in different niches. Why stay a member on one site when there are so many too choose from. For example back in the day BlacksonBlondes was the only place to get high quality interracial movies, not anymore.

2hp

Speak less, work more and you'll be fine.

Well if that's the case get out asap with big resume gaps it wont matter how many MBA's you have. ( I was a head hunter )

who were these bleeding hearts? i think those kinds of sites died out for a few reasons. surfers will only fall for it for so long. unless you can find 100k of "never seen it before" surfers every day things will plummet pretty quick. Cj's didn't last more than a couple years. i used to trade traffic with a bunch of them, though my site wasn't a CJ. for me the traffic was terrible and eventually they would send less and less and then were gone. the whole traffic script concept of 'sending back only what you send them' didn't really work from what i saw. there were sites that gave away plenty before CJ's came around and after they died out. i don't think free porn is what killed CJ's. i agree that people are giving away way too much but i don't agree that jerking around surfers is the solution.

beyond that i've always worried about the 'corporization' of the industry. the smaller webmaster affiliate either being pushed out unless they invest and start their own paysite network. i guess its an eventually in all industries but the question is how much longer.

the number of people brand new to the net will continue to shrink and so you have to give something people haven't seen before, causing limits to be pushed and pushed and desensitizing people to it all unless you basically shock them.

porn will always sell but there are ways the industry can be helped if we'd all agree to some standards. tgps and linklists and such are great but they keep demanding more and more. how much will we have to give away to keep them happy 5 years from now?

and one major thorn in the side of all online marketers as i see it is adware/spyware. sure there is big money if you're the one profiting off it but there are so many fucked up computers out there now that people are afraid to use because they might auto dial some place in africa or pop up porn every 3 clicks or whatever other tricks people have.

bad billing practices are another thing. people say sponsors have to do this to offer the payouts they do but its a shorterm solution that causes a longterm problem.

as for what its 'worth' to me. i personally don't think any future career i'll have will be harmed by the fact i made porn sites. its not like my name is published all over the place nor am i involved in the production of it. im happy to be able to work from home and the umlimted income potential.

I remember when people said cable television would never work because there was too much content on "free" networks. By the same token, I know guys that have beautiful sex fiend girlfriends but still love paying for whores.

Yes - you can grow your own but the supermarket will always provide a reason to pay for the convenience and offer what might not grow in your current climate.

The mantra I have chanted since day one: SEX IS FOOD AND PEOPLE HAVE TO EAT. The day people stop having sex is the day we have to worry about not having customers.

I'm two classes away from finishing the second MBA and I've learned it doesn't matter how many degrees you have. I was doing it to further myself and I wasn't saying that to brag in any way. Hell, I wish I could find another job (sometimes) ... but I suck at interviewing. If I could jump into the projects and prove myself that way I think I would do much better...any advice head hunter?!? : )

one of the best business threads

I am in BIZ only 19 months, but i see how sales goes down and we got less custom orders. I do not know why is that, because to many free porn? More competition? people want to see less porn? Any other reasons?
I am going to read this thread from the firlst word till the last one

Thanks for bumping this thread back to the front pages.. It gives a good idea of what people were thinking 2 years ago. Some of the same issues are still around today.

We still have Fed and legal issues, free content everywhere, new sites coming out everyday too name but a few.

The key to me anyways is to come up with new ideas, new content, new marketing, new markets, new products.. ect...

Thread is less than a year old. ; )

I cant agree more

I don't see it as a dying industry. It is, however, a changing industry. Things are constantly evolving, but that doesn't mean it's dying. Sure conversion ratios have shifted, but it doesn't make it a not worthwhile endeavor. The best thing to do is stay on top of the market trends, and keep providing better quality than what's on free sites and maintain subscribers that way.

You're right...but there are still exceptions.

Thread has been around for a long time...

sorry my bad..

what dave said. i worked in another one as well. the beverage industry. jsut went through a huge transition plateau. every industry does it. i remember when pps started, there will be new innovations, streamlining of existing ones and the smart people will adapt while others that can't keep up will drop off. the way i don't want to see things happen are things like .xxx where a vulture like lawley trys to sweep us all in one giant blow.

Some other data points to consider:

1. Back in the late 90's there was a massive rush of virgin internet users. People who had previously been only exposed to VHS porn and magazines. If you recall, these were the days when you would open your mailbox and 20 AOL CD's would fall on to the ground. This massive rush of new customers translated into massive sales. There is not a massive rush of fresh faces anymore. North America and Europe are wired almost completely.

This continued up to about 2001.

After 2001 the adult internet market matured (peaked).

I have been around long enough to see the real businessmen come and go. There are a few left that just can not let go of the industry... but the vast majority have moved on.

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2. One pussy, one anus, and one mouth.

Until evolution advances the female body... A woman is only going to have 3 holes and those 3 holes can only be filled a few ways.

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3. Look at the show floor in Vegas. I remember how it was in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 and then it slowly started to get smaller and smaller... How many booths in 2007?

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All of the above can be proven with Paycom's and CCBill's statistics. I would love to see either of them post publicly their total transaction volume from 1998 to 2007.

5 or 6 years ago it was like fishing in a trout hatchery. Hundreds of trout eating the same old shit, then one hook with a fresh live worm. The trout went fucking nuts and bit again and again.

Now there's 10,000 hooks and the trout are used to the worms.

Now it's a business based on margins and long term strategies. The put up a gallery and make bank days are over. We all need to do more with less and form the right partnerships to play off each other's strengths and downplay our weaknesses.

With all that being said, the lone fisherman that finds a "new worm" will still rake in the bucks - until the next 10,000 webmaster.. err.. fishermen copy him.

god bless the internets

The life cycle of an industry is much more complex than merely the big swallowing up their smaller competitors and the smallest of all dropping out.

The reality is that among the pioneers in any industry you care to examine, barely a handful ever prove able to move on to the next phase. Some of their trade names may survive, but the people who established those businesses will no longer be in charge.

And why should we expect them to be? The talents needed to build a business from scratch are completely different from those needed to run a corporate empire. Since both are rare, how much more rare it must be to find a single person who combines both.

Someone rightly pointed out that we are now in a consolidation phase. But this isn't good news even for those able to make acquisitions. Indeed this phase only exists because most of the early businesses reach the point where they can no longer generate growth except by acquisition. During this phase you also see companies attempting to control more of their supply line: in our case, by offering exclusive contracts to photographers, designers, etc and by buying up traffic sources.

But once the initial benefit of such acquisitions and extensions is over, most will prove to have been mistakes. Typical of the next phase will be companies "returning to their roots" and otherwise divesting themselves of many of their earlier acquisitions. For many that phase will be a last ditch attempt to stay afloat, but they will be too damaged to do so.

There are no reliable statistics to help us be sure. But it would be predictable for an industry at the stage at which online porn is now, for overall growth to be more or less stagnant. That is because the vast majority of the early entrepreneurs have gone as far as they are capable of going. What will propel us beyond the next phase is not people being smart or able to adapt, but the arrival of the suits and bean counters.

Because industrial development is not about the biggest relentlessly bigger. Rather it is like evolution, with sudden genetic mutations proving more successful than their predecessors. What will happen is that 10-15 years from now, a few of today's bigger businesses will have survived with their present owners and be very similar in size to today. A smaller number will still exist, but in name only. They will have become corporate owned and make up a new tier of the industry, far bigger than anything we have yet seen.

That will be the broad picture, precisely because as someone already noted, online porn is just like every other industry. And in the long run, we will produce our Sam Waltons who will displace our Franklin Woolworths, because that is another thing several in this thread seem to have forgotten: even when giant companies are the norm, few survive at the top for very long and the doors remain open to newcomers.

I LOVE YOUR THEORY, I WILL BE HERE FOR THAT!! BY THE WAY MY SITES CONVERT AT 1:100 ALL DAY LONG

Beautifully said.

nice thread.. adapt or die.

Look at it this way..Everyone says the AVS business is dead. We used to have 1:50 ration but it changed now to 1:250. It's not dead!

As long as you work hard at it, it will happen.

I seem to be doing OK after all these years.

This industry is far from dieing.

Ask Larry Flynt if he makes more today then he did 30 years ago?


The reality is more programs care about quantity over quality. And that is understandable.
Those that treat this as a business and apply business principals will always make money.
Consolidation will always happen and then it will grow again.
Years ago some companies were untouchable and where are they now?

Innovation comes with being one step ahead of the curve or making a product just a little better then the other guy.

Some companies grow too fast. Another business principal. It happens and when a slow down comes it can kill you.

There is more money in this industry then 5 years ago, except it is being broken down over more pieces.

Fear, threads like this are self fullfilling proficies...believe it and it will happen.

Honestly Platinum Daves post is bang on. Look at Ford today 100 years after making cars...they make the shittiest cars in the world.

Toyota is the biggest and best automaker only in the last couple years and the industry is over a 100 years old. How does a company just over 30 year old become the biggest in the world? Just make a product a little better then the other guy.

How does one of the biggest automobile maker in the world become the biggest money losing corporation in the world. Make a product just a little shittier then the others.

Too much free content and sites that offer 2000 DVD downloads for $9.95 /mo. make it increasingly difficult. But do agree that creative marketing efforts overcome these challenges to the marketplace.

Interesting post and I generally agree, but is porn like other industries that die eventually?

It seems to me that there will always be a demand for porn. Companies may die, and delivery mechanisms may change, but I bet 300 years from now there will be some form of porn being sold (successfully).