"Never teach a pig to sing. It will waste your time and annoy the pig"
This business in general, always attracts a caliber of people that are innately horrible business people. Mainstream or not, they will still be horrible business people.
People are searching for porn. It's a product like any other. Produce a quality product and market it well and sales are there. As Misterpeabody is saying, people in this biz do a shitty job marketing. Not because they don't understand porn, but because they don't understand business and marketing.
Here is simple food for thought about how misguided people are in this biz. An old argument as an analogy...
People have often claimed that "ugly sites convert better"
But... pretty sites convert well too.
Ugly sites can convert bad.
A simple truth and one that any experienced, competent marketer should understand is that it has nothing to do with nice or ugly. Clarity, as first example. Is it clear at a glance where that user is. Is it clear at a glance, whats being offered. Is it clear at a glance, what the value of the offer is. Is it clear at a glance that offer is what the surfer is looking for. Is it clear at at glance what action the surfer needs to take and what the benefit is of doing so. Or... is it just a bunch of pretty graphics distracting from the the offer, the content and an ambiguous call to action. That's one small example.
Continuity - from ad/link -> landing page (and supporting image/text/graphics) -> tour pages (and supporting image/text/graphics) -> join process -> members area is often a problem for people.
Webcams.com for example of poor continuity, also one of the early, arrogant "ugly sites sell" proponents and later changed their poorly through through site and a cleaner design on a poorly thought through site... You can have a white label set up on
www.yourdomain.com using the blue theme, set up for "free memberships" which leads to a gray/white theme webcams.com join page branded to them, which offers a "free membership" which then has a prechecked cross sale for 9.95 as well as a bizarre declaration that they might charge your card $1.00 from time to time to verify it (really an obvious device to skew CB ratios when needed) is a great example of shitty continuity and obvious charges that undermine "free" since its clearly not free as the surfer was told up to that point. Combine that with text heavy, poorly laid out join process with tons of random, distracting images and text and its pretty clear why you won't be doing too many "free" joins even when they are offering $25.00 ea. This site is a total mess, poorly thought through and poorly laid out.
Each model has multiple bio pages (her bio page, her photo galleries, her video galleries), its confusing as hell. AND BONUS, in what a blatant example of a completely and total innatention to basic heuristics and design/site element conventions, they are designed completely differently which is even weirder EX:
Profile? or is this
a profile? Why 2 different picture galleries with 2 different designs and 2 totally different look/feel that appear to be totally disconnected from each other? Why isn't it clear what to do/where to go from there?
Each page is such a mess in terms of the basic structure, that the entire site needs to be redone and cleaned up. If you click on a model and it goes to the page showing her currently in a private show... the page looks like a massive jumble of text with zero structure and no clear "this is whats going on, this is what i need to do" type flow to it. They send regular emails that are so pointless basically a single cam girls image - but poorly structured, with no clear organization and objective and which has what appears at a glance to be dozens of equally weighted links, - bio, pics, videos, join us etc etc as if they weren't really sure why they are sending me the email to begin with and are just hoping i'll click something.
Much of the adult industry is just like this. Done with the basic attitude of 'here's my shit, buy some'