I agree with you on almost anything you say.
Its not just marketing. This is a business where the vast majority of the old timers are gone. Those that aren't are just a small shadow of what they were in those early years. They are gone because they never understood their own business to begin with. A product was scarce, the market was young, the consumers inexperienced and immature... so they hastily threw something together and tossed it out there and online consumers ate it up. You couldn't get into a members area of any paysite in the early days without thinking "holy shit... this is all there is". Shitty plugin feeds, very little content relevant to the night the front end promoted and so on. Personally, i don't think i ever looked into a members area and thought "wow, i'd pay 39.95 a month for this" and from 98-05, I was inside almost all major paysites members areas.
As their business began to wither and die, they shifted their efforts from the usual hope of someone joining and forgetting to cancel or being embarrassed to charge back for 6 months to throwing huge parties and kissing ass to friends and trades between friends to scamming, shaving and carding. Why? Because they were never business people to begin with. They might have understood the product and that there was a demand for the product, but they had zero concept of how to market that product and how to conduct themselves like serious business people trying to build a loyal customer base. (those that did think like that are mostly still around today and have seen success that endured)
People in this business have always confused "conversions" and "joins" with great business sense. Those that measured their success in total unique hits per day are dead. But in the beginning, that's all that mattered. That's really all that people talked about.
The business matured at what might literally be described as the speed of light. It was always clear that as internet connections got faster, as broadband became more prevalent that a dramatic shift was going to take place in content and how its delivered.
What was interesting was asking "what is going to happen when the product is no longer scarce and the market is more mature and the consumers more experienced" and watching that change over time.
Even as we watch this shift, you see the same people and the same old story about how their business is failing because content is free. Excuses are just that. Excuses. They ignore that content was always free. They ignore that tube sites convert traffic well. They ignore that surfers have ALWAYS been willing to pay for a high quality, unique product. They ignore that content is not as scarce as it was. They ignore that people are not going online ONLY for porn anymore. They ignore that people are quickly distracted by facebook and other online activities. They ignore that surfers are much more mature than they were. They ignore that many surfers have been burned. They willfully ignore the multitude of factors that contribute to less conversions.
EXAMPLE:
Mobile conversions are declining slightly right now overall with a few big sponsors.
WHY:
Because the vast majority of surfers have now been exposed to it, whereas before they weren't. Many have joined. It's not longer a novelty. It's no longer a scarce product. As that market grows, more competition will enter, its becomes even less scarce, people are more educated on whats out there and ratios will continue to decline.
THEN WHAT:
Mobile conversions will continue to decline over the years just like tgp conversions or anything else. And once again, it won't be because of tube sites, it will be because of the fluid nature of the market. A perfectly nature business cycle in a free market.
EXCUSES:
This will not stop people from once again making the same claims and excuses that some other factor is causing declining sales. That if only "that terrible and wrong thing" was removed from the equation, conversions would go through the roof again.
Shap said it best the other day... "10 years later, a paysite is still a paysite and still marketed in the same way."
Probably one of the more interesting and thought provoking comments i've read in a while on here... which so few will truly understand its significance. Business is business. Customer is a customer. Marketing is marketing. A product is a product. Service is service. Management is management. Advertising is advertising.
Yes,
this business is FULL of HORRIBLE marketing.
But,
that is because its full of horrible business people.
